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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the determinants of the saving behaviour of Vietnamese households and to explore the possible heterogeneity of household saving propensities.

The authors estimate the effects of household characteristics on Vietnamese household saving rates by means of a quantile regression approach using the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey 2010 data set.

The results suggest that the way household characteristics influence saving rates is different for each quantile of the household saving rate distribution. Household characteristics tend to have stronger effects at lower quantiles. Particularly, the marginal propensity to save of households at low quantiles is higher than those at high quantiles. Analysing rural and urban households separately, the authors find evidence that household and household head characteristics have stronger significant effects for rural than for urban households. Children and elderly members should be treated as part of the household labour force, instead of household dependency, since both of them increase household saving rates.

This research contributes to the literature on Vietnamese household saving behaviours, especially for households living in urban areas.

The purpose of this paper is to determine the effects of socio-economic factors of land redistribution for agricultural development project beneficiaries on savings in the North West Province, South Africa.

A binary logistic regression model was employed to determine the effects of socio-economic factors of project beneficiaries on their savings.

The results show that the average number of trainings attended by the beneficiaries, the proportion of youth per project and the average net farm income of the project positively and significantly influence the level of savings by the beneficiaries. About 62 percent of the beneficiaries did not have savings; thus, only 38 percent of beneficiaries had savings. Of the 38 percent who had savings, the majority (77 percent) had an annual net farm income of less than R1,000. Only 2 percent of the projects had an annual net farm income of more than R10,000.

The findings of this study are valuable to policymakers dealing with the issue of land reform and could shed some light on how land redistribution can achieve its intended purposes. These findings should be granted serious consideration when formulating policies aimed at improving savings within collective groups.

The findings of this study have revealed the importance of training and participation of youth in influencing savings. As well, the findings imply that an organization or household with a health income have a higher propensity of saving.

The research findings point out to the importance of saving. With savings, a household is in a better position to deal with situations that arises in case of emergency.

This paper is among the few studies to analyze the determinants of savings at a group or project level. Most studies are done at household or individual level.

Farmers are the largest group of financially excluded persons in Nigeria, thereby highlighting the supply shortfall in finance to agriculture in Nigeria. Availability of finance would go a long way in improving output and productivity in agriculture, and consequently help in reducing poverty. This study conducts an empirical investigation of the effects of financial inclusion on agricultural productivity in Nigeria.

This study makes use of the Living Standards Measurement Study–Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA). This is a new data set on agricultural households which contains information on agricultural activities and various household activities, including banking, savings and insurance behaviour. Considering the data are such that there are observations for households over three time periods, the study exploits the time series and cross-section dimension of the data by using panel data estimation.

The empirical results of the study show that financial inclusion, irrespective of how it is measured, has exerted positive and statistically significant effects on agricultural productivity in Nigeria.

While considerable research has been conducted to examine how finance affects broad macroeconomic aggregates, little is known about the effects of finance at the household and individual level. It is important to explicitly account for financial inclusion when examining the effects of finance on individuals and households. This study improves on existing research and offers new insights into the effects of financial inclusion on the economic activities of agricultural households in Nigeria.

This study estimates impact of remittances from internal migration on households' use of bank services in Vietnam.

This study uses data from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Survey and the two-stage least squares method (2SLS).

The results show that receiving internal remittance increases households' probability of having bank accounts and using card services. However, these impacts are different between rural and urban areas.

The results of this study reveal the useful role of internal remittance in increasing the probability of households using bank services, thereby enhancing financial inclusion in Vietnam.

Different from the previous studies, the purpose of this paper is to analyse the impact of internal remittance on the use of bank services in Vietnam at the household level. This paper targets internal migration because it is the main type of migration in Vietnam. Besides, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first one that compares the role of internal remittance on households' use of bank services in rural and urban areas in Vietnam.

In the last two decades, the dependence of Taiwan’s manufacturing production on imported intermediate inputs has steadily risen. Meanwhile, the market share of imported consumable manufacture products has also increased. The steady rise of both import shares may not be explained by price fact or since the relative import prices have shown no decreasing trend. The scenario of constantly buying more imported goods when they are not cheaper can be treated as a preference change in favor of imported goods, which may be caused by the popularity of outsourcing, increasing product varieties and persistent trade barriers, as literatures indicated. Traditional macroeconomic models primarily consider the price mechanism in their import demand estimates, with no concern for changes in import preferences. Neglecting changing import preferences in a rapid globalization environment may yield biased empirical results. In this article, we incorporate the import preference factor into a single-country Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model and use it firstly to quantify the scale of preferences change and then to test how the preferences change affects the effects of trade policy. The empirical results with and without the concern of import preferences change are compared to yield the scale of bias caused by neglecting the change.

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) of countries has some of the highest electricity consumptions and carbon dioxide emissions per capita in the world. This poses a direct challenge to the GCC government’s ability to meet their CO₂ reduction targets. In this review paper the current household electricity consumption situation in the GCC is reviewed.

Three scenarios for reducing energy consumption and CO₂ emissions are proposed and evaluated using strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) as well as the political, economic, social, technical, legal and environmental (PESTLE) frameworks.

The first scenario found that using solar Photovoltaic (PV) or hybrid solar PV and wind system to power household lighting could save significant amounts of energy, based on lighting making up between 8% to 30% of electricity consumption in GCC households. The second scenario considers replacement of conventional appliances with energy-efficient ones that use around 20% less energy. The third scenario looks at influencing consumer behavior towards sustainable energy consumption.

Pilot trials of these scenarios are recommended for a number of households. Then the results and feedback could be used to launch the schemes GCC-wide.

The proposed scenarios are designed to encourage responsible electricity consumption and production within households (SDG12).

All three proposals are found viable for policymakers to implement. However, to ensure successful implementation GCC Governments are recommended to review all the opportunities and challenges associated with these schemes as laid out in this paper.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the impacts of fiscal policy, namely, net tax and government expenditure on national saving and its nonlinearity. The author first investigates whether the impacts of fiscal policy on national saving have changed after the global financial crisis of 2008. Then, the author tests the nonlinearity of the relationship by taking account of the economic cycle, namely, economic expansion (boom) and economic recession (bust).

The empirical model bases on a reduced-form equation with national saving as a dependent variable, lagged value of national saving, output gap and fiscal policy as independent variables. The two-step system GMM approach was employed to estimate the empirical model, using a panel of 23 emerging Asian economies in the period of 1990-2015.

The empirical results show that tax policy and expenditure policy follow the predictions of the overlapping generation model with finite horizon and the Keynesian view. The nonlinearity of fiscal policy is twofold. The conduct of fiscal policy in the period after 2008 seems effective, while the effect is insignificant in the period before 2008. Likewise, fiscal policy tends to have more significant effects in bust cycle. The effect of tax policy is increased during recession, while the effect of government spending is more pronounced during economic downturn.

The contributions of this paper are twofold. First, it is shown that fiscal policies in the region had more impacts on national saving after the global financial crisis of 2008. Second, the research confirms nonlinear impact of fiscal policy on saving behavior during economic recession and economic boom.

This study aims to investigate the main drivers of private saving in Egypt (2005–2020).

It employs an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach for quarterly data on private saving, lagged private saving, real gross domestic product (GDP) growth, public saving, inflation, real interest rate, money supply, current account deficit and unemployment.

Private saving in Egypt displays persistency and public saving depresses private saving in the short run and long run. Real interest rate, inflation and unemployment have negative and statistically significant impacts on private saving in the short run and long run. The current account deficit displays a negative effect on private saving but is significant only in the short run. Other incorporated variables, like real GDP and money supply, are not statistically significant. This could be attributed to the high consumption rather than saving motive of the Egyptian population and their tendency to rely more on other informal saving channels.

Findings are of policy relevance as unleashing the determinants of private saving guides policymakers in formulating the appropriate sustainable development policies. It also assists in identifying the main obstacles hindering the promotion of private saving and hence major areas for policy intervention, like financial inclusion, poverty eradication, employment generation and structural reforms.

This study contributes to the literature: (1) it tackles private saving figure rather than aggregate saving figure that is covered by similar studies due to lack of consistent data, (2) given the relatively low quality, unavailability and inconsistency of data on private saving in developing countries, investigating the determinants of private saving should be carried out on an individual country basis which is done by this study, (3) this study fulfills the gap in literature related to the lack of up-to-date studies on private saving in Egypt and (4) it relies on quarterly data that could produce more reliable results.

The authors introduce non-Ricardian (“hand-to-mouth”) myopic agents into an otherwise standard real-business-cycle (RBC) setup augmented with a detailed government sector. The authors investigate the quantitative importance of the presence of nonoptimizing households for cyclical fluctuations in Bulgaria.

The authors calibrate the RBC model to Bulgarian data for the period following the introduction of the currency board arrangement (1999–2018).

The authors find that the inclusion of such non-Ricardian households improves model performance along several dimensions and generally provides a better match vis-a-vis data, as compared to the standard model populated with Ricardian agents only.

This is a novel finding in the macroeconomic studies on Bulgaria using modern quantitative methods.

The purpose of this paper is to employ the computable general equilibrium (CGE) approach to examine how the European–Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) impacts on the Vietnamese economy in the case of the removal of industrial tariffs.

The authors construct a social accounting matrix based on the latest data of the Vietnam input-output Table for the year 2012 and then apply the CGE model to simulate the economic scenarios when the tariff rate of the industrial sector reduces to 0 percent.

The first simulation results demonstrate that the elimination of tariffs in the industrial sector will lead to a 9.13 percent increase in household consumption, together with an increase in the factors of production of the agricultural, industrial and service sectors by 9.61, 9.74 and 8.21 percent, respectively. The EVFTA also causes a deficit in the trade balance because the value of imports increases by 12.54 percent, while exports’ value slightly increases by 2.71 percent. Furthermore, there has been a drop of 2.29 percent in the total government income; nevertheless, social welfare witnesses a gain of 9.13 percent. The second scenario simulation draws crucial attention to policymakers that a small fluctuation in the production tax rate will cause a significant change in the economy.

The reduction of tariff in the industrial sector will increase the social welfare and strengthen the whole economy regarding the growth of household consumption, factors of production and trade value. On the unfavorable side, the EVFTA causes a national budget deficit and puts pressure on domestic production. This paper is a valuable reference for governments and policymakers when they decide to reduce tariffs or adjust production taxes once Vietnam integrates into the world economy.

This study differs from previous research works by utilizing a static CGE model to investigate the impact of removing the industrial tariff on the economy under EVFTA.