Indian households save more than Chinese!

According to a new report by McKinsey “Putting China's capital to work”, Chinese households save 23.8% of their disposable income, not particularly high compared to the saving rates of Asian tigers in their high growth period.

Indian households save 31.9% of their income, a ratio that is much higher than Chinese. The current saving rate of French is 16.6%

Chinese = high saving rate? Myth busted!

The report points out that the high total saving rate of China is mostly the result of higher corporate saving rate, which stands at twice world average. The report however also cautions readers that the higher household saving rate of Indians could be the result of small and micro businesses reporting themselves as households.

Nevertheless, the Chinese saving rate could be overestimated too, as Chinese disposable income, the denominator of the ratio,  is severely under-reported because of the huge underground economy.

Note that saving rate of an average Chinese household could be much lower than the headline number. In 2003, 1.86% of the wealthiest Chinese households control 60% of the total stock of liquid financial assets in China, and they certainly have much higher saving rate than poor people. A McKinsey survey indeed shows that the lowest income quintile of Chinese households save only 20% of their income.

Comments

[Ajay Shah]

I think the close numerical values between Indian and Chinese household savings rates has been well known for a while. The reason why, overall, China shows such a high savings rate is the high retained earnings of the companies. This is related to corporate governance issues in China. Apparently there is a tradition in China that SOEs never pay dividends. So each SOE manager builds an empire, and trades favours within the communist party system, without regard for cost of capital or the interests of shareholders.

So the twin phenomena - of low stock valuations and a high savings rate - are related.