Saving and the Accumulation of Wealth

The evolution of private saving and its interaction with government fiscal policy play an important and complex role in the development of the national economy. To gain insight into this process, it is imperative that we improve our understanding of the savings behavior of individual households and of the ways in which they aggregate over the entire population to produce national saving. Italy provides an ideal laboratory in which to assess the impact of government and private transfer, imperfections in the capital markets, productivity growth and shifting demographic patterns on the saving behavior of individual households and on their aggregation into total private saving. The book draws on the Italian experience and data, and offers new findings on many aspects of the process of saving determination.