International Differences in Saving
利用1960-87年OECD国家统一核算数据，分析工业国储蓄与投资模式变化，指出美国经常账户赤字主因是国内低储蓄而非日本贸易壁垒，并探讨公共与私人储蓄的分解。
The adequacy of national saving has taken on increasing importance in an era of large external imbalances among the major industrial countries. At least among economists, current account imbalances are seen as largely the outcome of domestic patterns of saving and investment rather than trade practices. Thus, the low level of saving in the United States, rather than a failure of Japan to open its economy, is the primary cause of the U.S. current account deficit. Most of the discussion of the decline of U.S. saving has focused upon the emergence of a large government budget deficit in the 1980s, and has largely ignored an equally large decline in an already low level of private saving. At the same time, much of what we think we know about private saving behavior and the potential effectiveness of various policies to influence it are dominated by experience only within our own country. But, many of the factors in which we are most interested have exhibited very limited historical variation within the United States, and of necessity the conclusions are ambiguous. The purpose of this note is to make use of an underutilized data source, that provides information on the saving and investment of the industrial countries within a common accounting framework, to examine the pattern of change over time, and the similarity of response to various economic disturbances in the 1970s and 1980s. The basic annual data are drawn from the System of National Accounts (SNA) submitted by the individual member countries to the OECD for the period, 1960-87. While the original analysis was undertaken for the seven largest nations plus a representative set of six smaller countries, but the summary reported here is limited to the United States, Japan, and an aggregate of nine European countries. The data are presented within a simple accounting framework that relates the current account surplus (CA) to the difference between domestic saving (S) and domestic investment (I). Domestic saving and investment can be further subdivided into their public and private components,