Illustration by scott roberts
Published January 19, 2016.
National savings rates are a rough measure of the degree to which countries are deferring consumption today in favor of consumption tomorrow. The World Bank has refined the measure, adding education outlays to gross savings, then netting out the depreciation of existing physical capital, the depletion of non-renewable resources and ongoing damage to the environment. Here, I've selected three high-income countries, four middle-income emerging-market countries and the whole Sub-Saharan region for comparison.
Some of the results are unsurprising. China and India save a whole lot, while Germany tops the United States in thrift. But others are striking:
• Russia is only sustaining consumption by depleting energy wealth.
• Japan, once the savings champ of Asia, has dramatically retreated as workers retire and young families eschew reproduction.
• Judging by its anemic savings rate, Brazil’s long-term growth prospects are likely to remain deeply problematic.
• While sub-Saharan Africa can no longer be written off as a disaster in slow motion, resource depletion and environmental damage are still taking a heavy toll.
— peter passell
Percent of Gross National Income
|Less: Consumption of fixed capital||15.5||21.0||17.4||18.2||9.9||5.1||12.3||8.6|
|Net forest depletion||0.0||0.0||0.0||0.0||1.2||0.0||0.8||1.9|
|Air pollution damage||0.2||0.1||0.2||0.4||1.1||0.4||0.1||1.1|
|Adjusted net savings||5.1||2.9||12.1||30.3||19.8||10.9||3.2||6.7|
|Note: Gross National Income (GNI) = GDP + remittances from abroad source: World Bank, Little Green Data Book 2015|