Escaping negative genuine savings? Distribution dynamics of adjusted net savings in 160 countries, 1990–2021
Negatif gerçek tasarruftan kaçış mümkün mü? 160 ülkede düzeltilmiş net tasarrufların dağılım dinamikleri, 1990–2021
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Abstract
Adjusted net savings (ANS), or genuine savings, measure whether a country's total wealth, including natural capital, is rising or falling, and persistently negative values signal weak unsustainability. This paper studies how the whole cross-country distribution of ANS evolves, rather than its mean. Using World Bank data for 160 countries from 1990 to 2021, I estimate annual and five-year Markov transition matrices over six ANS classes, compute ergodic distributions, mobility indices and mean first-passage times, test homogeneity over time and across resource dependence, and estimate stochastic kernels. The share of countries with negative ANS fell from 32% in 1990 to 14% in 2019, but negative savings are persistent: a country below −5% of GNI remains there for five years with probability 0.54 and needs about 14 years on average to reach non-negative savings. The ergodic distribution implies that 12–16% of countries would remain negative savers in the long run. The annual chain understates five-year persistence, so the process is not first-order Markov at the annual frequency. Resource dependence changes the dynamics fundamentally (likelihood-ratio p < 10⁻⁶): among countries with natural resource rents of at least 10% of GDP, the ergodic share of negative savers is 25–27%, against 9–13% for other countries, and the distribution is polarised between high-saving and depleting economies. These patterns, robust to rent thresholds, a balanced panel and the exclusion of pandemic years, identify a resource-linked trap in weak sustainability and support Hartwick-type rules for reinvesting resource rents.
Keywords
Adjusted net savings; Genuine savings; Weak sustainability; Distribution dynamics; Markov chains; Natural resource rents; Resource curse
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