Pension reforms and saving gains in the United Kingdom

The empirical validity of the effect of pension reforms on domestic savings in the UK has been investigated using an Auto-regressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model capable of testing for the existence of a long-run relationship regardless of whether the underlying time series are individually I(1) or I(0). The total savings response to change in pension savings is positive and significant, but an increase in occupational pension saving appears offset by a decrease in other forms of saving. This paper concludes that there is no firm evidence that aggregate savings increase considerably because of privately funded pension schemes.