IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/imf/imfwpa/2021-257.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Household Deleveraging and Saving Rates: A Cross-Country Analysis

Author

Listed:
  • Romain Bouis

Abstract

Historically high household debt in several economies is calling for a deleveraging, but according to some economists, this adjustment can slow GDP growth by weighing on consumption. Using a sample of advanced and emerging market economies, this paper finds evidence of a negative relationship between changes of household debt-to-income ratios and saving rates. This relationship is however asymmetric, being significant only for debt build-ups. Declining debt ratios and saving are significantly related in some economies, but the relationship is driven by consumer credit, not by mortgages. Results therefore suggest that the economic cost associated with household deleveraging may be overestimated and motivate a deleveraging via lower mortgages.

Suggested Citation

  • Romain Bouis, 2021. "Household Deleveraging and Saving Rates: A Cross-Country Analysis," IMF Working Papers 2021/257, International Monetary Fund.
    • Handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2021/257
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/cat/longres.aspx?sk=501344
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. McIndoe-Calder, Tara, 2024. "Administrative meets survey data: measuring household indebtedness in Ireland," Research Technical Papers 2/RT/24, Central Bank of Ireland.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:imf:imfwpa:2021/257. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Akshay Modi (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/imfffus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.