Transizione demografica e formazione del risparmio delle famiglie italiane

Massimo Baldini and Carlo Mazzaferro

Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna

Abstract: This paper studies the relationship between population ageing and saving formation by Italian households. We use five cross-sectional budget surveys to separately construct the age and cohort profiles of the saving rate. After detrending the data, we isolate the age and cohort effects on saving. Cohort effects show that, in the current Italian population, saving behaviour is markedly different across generations. The estimates obtained on survey data are then used to derive a forecast of the medium and long run tendency of the household saving rate (2000-2050). In the absence of any changes in the saving behaviour of young cohorts, the saving rate falls by 15% at the end of the period. The recent reforms of the pension system could induce the young to increase their saving, but the available empirical evidence leads to a scenario where the effects of the pension reform on the incentive to save and accumulate are low, and may be neutralised by the mechanism of intergenerational transfers. Even in a scenario where the young actually react to the pension reform, the reduction in total household wealth at the end of the life-cycle leads to a decrease in aggregate household saving.

Date: 2000
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://amsacta.unibo.it/4943/1/366.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bol:bodewp:366

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna ().