Household Savings Rate
Get the Gross Household Savings Rate for a variety of countries over time from the OECD’s Household Dashboard. The household savings rate is the share of household gross disposable income (adjusted for the net change in pension entitlements) that is saved rather than spent on final consumption.
It is a key input to consumption-smoothing and life-cycle/permanent-income theories of household behaviour, and a closely watched signal of both near-term consumption momentum (a falling savings rate can temporarily prop up spending even as income growth slows) and a household sector’s buffer against future income shocks. It complements Total Consumption (see get_total_consumption) - the two together show how much of household income is spent versus set aside.
The rate is seasonally adjusted and returned as a decimal fraction of adjusted gross disposable income (0.1177 for 11.77%). Because the denominator is adjusted for the net change in pension entitlements and the numerator is gross rather than net saving, this sits above the personal saving rate the BEA publishes for the United States.
See definition: https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?df[ds]=dsDisseminateFinalDMZ&df[id]=DSD_HHDASH%40DF_HHDASH_INDIC
Also known as: household savings ratio, personal savings rate.
Household Savings Rate in Python or via the MCP
Install the Finance Toolkit with:
pip install financetoolkit -U
Then call get_household_savings_rate as shown below.
from financetoolkit import Economics
economics = Economics(start_date='2015-01-01', end_date='2022-12-31')
economics.get_household_savings_rate(
countries=['United States', 'Germany'],
quarterly=False)
Or, after setting up the Finance Toolkit MCP, ask:
What share of their disposable income did households in the United States and Germany save each year from 2015 to 2022?
Which returns:
| United States | Germany | |
|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 0.1152 | 0.1724 |
| 2016 | 0.1112 | 0.1715 |
| 2017 | 0.1153 | 0.1757 |
| 2018 | 0.1222 | 0.182 |
| 2019 | 0.1305 | 0.1793 |
| 2020 | 0.2063 | 0.2324 |
| 2021 | 0.1707 | 0.2199 |
| 2022 | 0.0981 | 0.189 |
Parameters
get_household_savings_rate accepts the following parameters.
| Parameter | Type | Description | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
countries | list[str] | str | None | The countries to include in the data. Defaults to None. | ["United States", "Germany"] |
quarterly | bool | None | Whether to return the quarterly data (True) or the annual data (False). Defaults to None, which returns the quarterly data, the highest frequency the OECD publishes. | True |
rolling | int | The rolling window size to use for smoothing the data (simple moving average). Defaults to None. | 4 |
trailing | int | The trailing window size to use for summing the data over trailing periods (e.g. a trailing-4-quarter sum). Defaults to None. | 4 |
growth | bool | Whether to return the growth data or the actual data. Defaults to False. | True |
lag | int | The number of periods to lag the data by. Defaults to 1. | 4 |
standardize | bool | Whether to standardize (Z-Score) the result. When combined with growth=True, standardizes the growth values instead of the raw values. Defaults to False. | True |
rounding | int | None | The number of decimals to round the results to. Defaults to None. | 2 |