Reconstructing the Savings Glut: The Global Implications of Asian Excess Saving
Bibliographic record
Abstract
East Asian, and primarily Chinese and Japanese, excess saving has been comparatively large and controversial since the 1980s. Its contribution to the decline in the global “natural” rate of interest is consistent with Bernanke’s much debated “savings glut” hypothesis for the decade after 1998, though empirical explorations of of this have proved unconvincing. In this paper it is argued that the comparatively integrated global market for long bonds is suggestive of trends in the global “Wicksellian” natural rate and that the longer term evidence supports a leading role for Asia’s contribution to the expansion of ex ante global saving in explaining the declining trend in real long yields. Evidence is presented that trends in US 10 year bond yields are indeed representative of those in the global natural rate. The relationship between these yields and excess saving in China and Japan is then explored using a VECM that accounts for US monetary policy. The results support a negative long term relationship between 10-year yields and the current account surpluses of China and Japan. Projections based on these results suggest feasible future declines in Japanese and Chinese excess saving could cause the path of long rates to to be higher by 330 basis points over the next decade.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".