Population Structure, Economic Growth And Urban Residents In China Savings Rate

Through a 3-periods Overlapping-generation model, this paper analyses the crucial factors such as demographic structure and economic growth rate in the formation of the Chinese urban household saving rate with a collection of provincial panel data from 1952-2005. For the first time this paper did further research on the provincial panel data before the One-child policy and afterwards, also adding some other control variables.The results from both the static fixed-effect model and dynamic panel data model show that: in the countrywide and the eastern and middle provinces, the life-cycle hypothesis is suitable to explain the high household saving rate there; both the income growth rate and demographic factors have statistically significant impact on the dependent variable, meanwhile the lagged saving rate also has a crucial impact on the present saving rate, indicating a strong inertial effect.The sample of the western provinces provides negative evidence for the Life-cycle hypothesis but can be explained by the conventional Keynesian saving theory. This is likely that people in the west area have such a low income that the Keynesian saving theory is superior to the life-cycle hypothesis.Moreover, in the sample of the western provinces old-dependency ratio doesn't significantly affect the urban household saving rate, which can be explained by the bequest motive by the old people there. The strong bequest motive weakens the demographic effect predicted by the LCH model.This paper's finding infers that with the youth dependency ratio reaching the lower limit and the ever-increasing old dependency ratio, the Chinese urban household saving rate has already passed its climax, however, with the strong inertial effect the urban household saving rate will decrease gradually in the medium run.