What Is the Use of Frenchmen' Annual Savings?

The structure of national accounts clearly indicates that the annual flow of household savings has three allocations: loan repayments, personal contribution for real estate investments and financial investments. Unfortunately, this decomposition of the flow of savings is not now documented. The main reason for this surprising ignorance is that, for the financing of these different operations, households do not only resort to credit and current savings, but also to prior savings. This last resource corresponds to one of these wealth management operations, the knowledge of which can only result from specific surveys, which are now non-existent.

For a country like France, based on several conjectures, we observe that this allocation of the flow of savings could be variable according to the characteristics of the year considered (level of the savings rate, importance of the recourse to credit ). However, the share of financial investments appears to be high and stable (around half of the total flow). Refunds would be large, but unstable (between 25 and 40%). The share of personal contributions would also be unstable, but at a much more modest level (less than 20%). For countries such as the United States or the United Kingdom, the share of repayments in current savings could be much lower, due to late repayments, largely relying on pre-savings. This could be one of the reasons for the permanent weakness of their household savings rate compared with countries like France.