David Elms, chief executive of unbiased.co.uk, said, 'This year's research into the nation's
propensity to save shows some improvement, but it is disappointing that we still define ourselves as a nation of spenders rather than a nation of savers.'
Reza Chady, director at GfK Martin Hamblin, said: "The additional pressure on disposable income from higher interest seems to be impacting on consumer spending and encouraging caution, as seen in the increased
propensity to save."
According to a broadly accepted basic view, first formulated in the Life Cycle Hypothesis (Modigliani, 1954, 1956) and in the Permanent Income Hypothesis (Friedman, 1957), consumption is a relatively stable fraction of permanent income (life resources), mostly influenced by its long-run growth, but is not very sensitive to transitory fluctuations in earnings; this means that the marginal propensity to consume (c) with respect to short-run, cyclical variation of income, tends to be relatively small, and therefore the corresponding
propensity to save (s = 1 - c) tends to be large.
We have assumed a deterministic framework in order to obtain tractable and yet revealing results regarding the
propensity to save for retirement.
Another controversy is about the level of the Marginal Propensity to Consume (MPC) and, therefore, the Marginal
Propensity to Save (MPS).
[ClickPress, Mon Jul 15 2013] The
propensity to save has crept into the baby products market as well; volume sales are going down for many of the baby and child-specific categories.
Pakistani consumers being net spenders with low
propensity to save would spend in this sector, therefore banks will disburse.
Let [gamma] = [partial]I/[partial]y > 0 be the marginal propensity to invest, [theta] = [partial]NX/[partial]y < 0 be the marginal negative trade balance effect (due to the marginal propensity to import), and [alpha] = [partial]S/[partial]y > 0 be the marginal
propensity to save.
The study found that the
propensity to save out of transitory income was higher than that for permanent income.
But savings levels in the region are set to remain static over the coming months as people predict a neutral
propensity to save.