High household wealth is often cited as a key strength of the Italian economy. Both in absolute terms and relative to income, the Italian household sector is wealthier than most euro area peers. A sizable fraction of this wealth is held by the rich and upper middle classes. This paper documents...

China’s household saving rate has increased markedly since the mid-1990s and the age-savings profile has become U-shaped. We find that rising income uncertainty and pension reforms help explain both of these phenomena. Using a panel of Chinese households covering the period 1989-2006, we...

Financial inclusion is a multidimensional concept and countries have chosen diverse methods of enhancing financial inclusion with varying degrees of results. The heterogeneity of financial inclusion is particularly striking in the Asia-Pacific region as member countries range from those that are...

This paper theoretically and empirically investigates the role of spousal labor in buffering transitory shocks to husbands'' earnings. To measure the amount of the shock that spousal labor absorbs, an instrumented cross-sectional variance decomposition is developed. Using data from the Panel...

This paper gauges the key determinants of China''s private consumption in relation to GDP using data on the Chinese economy and evidence from other countries'' experiences. The results suggest there is nothing ""special"" about consumption in China. Rather, the challenge is to explain why the...

This paper examines the dynamic relationship between trade and income. While most economists agree that increased trade leads to an increase in average income, economic theory is ambiguous about the possible effects on the long-run growth rate of the economy. Using a dynamic panel data model,...

A firm theoretical basis for the empirical relationship between dependency rates and savings behavior in developing countries is still lacking. Two demographic extensions of the representative household’s stochastic dynamic optimization problem are presented here. It is shown that the...