Savings and growth in Bangladesh

Savings and growth are often strongly correlated. Thus, it is important to study the determinants of savings and the direction of causality between savings and growth as these have important implications for development policy. Yet, careful empirical studies on savings behavior are missing for Bangladesh. Thus, in this paper, we estimate the long-run total and private savings functions for Bangladesh using recent time series techniques. We find that the total savings rate is mainly determined by the GDP growth rate, dependency ratio, interest rates and bank density. The private savings rate is also affected by the public savings rate. Further, using the Granger Causality tests, we find that in Bangladesh, there is a bi-directional causality between savings and growth. We also carry out the Forecast Error Variance Decomposition (FEVD) analysis using the VAR framework. The FEVD results confirm the causality results obtained using the Granger causality tests as well as the estimated savings functions.