| Summary: | Thesis (MDF)--Stellenbosch University, 2014. === ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The South African financial sector is developed by world standards, surpassing those of other emerging and developed countries. However, despite all this development in the financial sector, the country has low levels of savings. This contradicts some of the available literature which explains the link between financial development and savings. Based on this background, the study empirically examines the relationship between financial development and savings mobilization in South Africa, employing the Johansen cointegration test for the period 1980 to 2012. Based on the lifecycle hypothesis, a model linking savings and its determinants was specified. The empirical results revealed that there is a long-term relationship between savings and the other variables used in the model. The different measures which were employed to measure financial development were found to be positive and significant, implying that financial sector development impacts positively on savings. An interesting observation from the empirical results is the negative relationship between the rate of interest and savings which implies that South Africans are net borrowers as the income effect surpasses the substitution effect. This in part explains the low levels of savings being experienced by the country since an increase in the rate of interest results in people paying more to service their debt and hence a reduction in savings.
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