international financial markets, economic agents in the developing economies are subject to tight credit constraints which
are more pronounced during bad state of nature. Thus, adverse shocks to commodity prices in world market force them to
reduce savings by a larger amount than they would otherwise have. The opposite happens during the good times. As the
households internalize the likelihood of facing binding borrowing constraints during bad times, they may also lower consumption
and save more during good times.
A number of more specific conclusions can also be derived. First, private savings rate is highly persistent in these economies.
The effect of a change in one of the determinants of savings is fully realized only after a number of years. Long-term
responses are approximately two times that of the short-term responses.
Second, private savings rate rises with the level of real per capita income. So policies that stimulate development can indirectly
raise savings rate. Third, financial reform has adversely affected private savings in these countries. Larger financial
depth, higher real interest rates and interest rate margin changes fail to increase the private savings rate. The adverse effect
is more pronounced in the African countries than in the Asian and Latin American countries. Reform in the financial sector
has stimulated consumption by relaxing domestic liquidity constraints through, say, increased access to bank credit, and
thus reduced the propensity to save.
Fourth, macroeconomic instability, measured by inflation rate, causes an increase in the precautionary motive to save.
Similar behavior is evident when volatility of income is introduced in the model. The advent of high inflation and high
unemployment, along with cuts in public benefits have raised income uncertainty and changed expected future income
profiles in these countries.27 The results in this paper show that households have responded by increasing precautionary
savings.
Fifth, the private sector internalizes the government’s budget constraint. The Ricardian equivalence is rejected for all
three country groupings. Sixth, a marginally negative impact of an increase in the dependency rate on private savings is evident
suggesting that a smoothing out of uneven income flows over the life cycle may not be the main motive for saving.
Finally, in contrast to the intertemporal choice literature, this paper finds the permanent component of the terms of trade
to have a significant positive impact on private savings. Transitory movements in the terms of trade also have a significant
positive impact and a larger magnitude than the permanent component. This reflects the lack of access to foreign borrowing
that many of the developing economies have faced during the last decade. Although the impact of terms of trade shocks is
found to be asymmetric in the developing economies, the magnitude of the impact appears to be relatively small.