Determinants of the private savingsrate in Sweden

This thesis investigates the determinants of private savings in Sweden, covering the time period 1914-2014. The steadily increasing fraction of the elderly, as a percentage of the working age population is a demographic development confronted by almost all industrialized countries nowadays. These conditions will bring further economic pressure on the finance of the social security systems in the years to come, hence affecting private savings. The association between private savings, globalization of capital markets and the release of liquidity constraints in many countries might also be an important determinant. These new conditions have in some cases improved consumer welfare by enabling more intertemporal substitution, the process of maximizing consumer’s utility by allocating resources across time. In this study the savings function is estimated based on several aspects concerning demographic and economic factors, based on the theories; life-cycle hypothesis of saving, precautionary saving theory, permanent income hypothesis and the Ricardian Equivalence theory. This study suggests that the private saving function is sensitive to the inflation rate and the policy implication of the relationship is presented