The real economic benefit, however, is in the cost savings thereafter.

In Spain, for example, local savings banks (cajas) financed an outsize real estate boom.

Last but not least, US tax policy hardly encourages private sector savings, especially giving the preferential tax treatment of real estate.

Unfortunately, this focus on savings distorts understanding and distracts from the real challenge of creating mass consumption markets in developing countries.

The world may enter a new era in which investment demand exceeds desired savings which means that real interest rates must rise.

Moreover, China s aging population, and its strategy of boosting domestic consumption, will negatively affect global savings. The world may enter a new era in which investment demand exceeds desired savings which means that real interest rates must rise.

Budget deficits offered what appeared to be a free lunch, as the resulting inflation eroded the real value of public debt, while the government had privileged access to private savings at near zero real interest rates.

Savings

Broadly speaking, capital inflows led to real revaluation and a lower domestic savings rate relative to investment in the southern countries, resulting in structural current account deficits.

Low savings countries cannot easily adjust without an equivalent adjustment in high savings countries, because their low savings rates may have been caused by high savings abroad.

The Yètè Mali Savings Network or savings and loan cooperative.

Falling interest rates in recent years pushed up real estate prices and allowed America s upper middle class to treat their houses as enormous ATM s, lowering savings still more.

Both the savings shortage and savings glut hypotheses confuse accounting outcomes with causes.

Japan s Savings Crisis

Demand savings accounts

Term savings accounts

The real economic benefit, however, is in the cost savings thereafter. To be sure, a lot will depend on the availability of convenient charging stations, but they are starting to appear.

Apart from accounting for the global divergence in savings rates, tight credit constraints in China might explain the country s high, and rising, savings rate especially as the large rise in national savings is attributable mostly to household savings.

These days the Chairman of President Bush s Council of Economic Advisers, Ben Bernanke, likes to talk about a global savings glut that has produced astonishingly low real interest rates around the world.

Balancing China s High Savings

Savings rates shot up.

We have enormous energy savings.

(b) To achieve cost savings

Fadil's life savings were gone.

These are Sami's life savings.

Sami stole Layla's life savings.

Generally speaking, savings are increasing.

Savings on prior period obligations

First, they can improve value for money (in that better value for money can be achieved through a competitive market price, and substantial cost savings can be realized through dynamic and real time trading).

For nearly a decade, capital from high savings countries like Germany flowed to low savings countries like Spain.

Important benefits of trade and transport facilitation measures relate to time savings, which often outweigh direct cost savings.

Africa needed capital, but lacked savings.

Why Are Savings Patterns So Different?

When spectacular inflation hit Germany in 1923, it wiped out the real value of the (unhedged and unindexed) life savings and social security benefits of millions of people, whose anger contributed to the rise of Nazism.

This story is fundamentally different from the savings shortage and savings glut hypotheses, and it leads to dramatically different policies.

The Asia Pacific region has the highest savings rate in the world, although intercountry variations in savings rates have been noticed.

For 2002, there were savings of 473,062 kWh for 2003, average energy savings were of the order of 27.6 per cent.

Savings are, of course, no bad thing.

Domestic savings, however, remain a major constraint.

Meanwhile, China s savings rate remains stubbornly high.

Talk abounds of a global savings glut.

One problem the poor often have in accumulating savings is lack of easy access to savings accounts where they can deposit money.

Government savings have fallen, especially in the United States and Japan, and household savings have virtually disappeared in some countries with housing booms.

Our customers get to enjoy huge CO2 savings.

The potential energy savings is very, very significant.