| Abstract from DBPedia | Saving is income not spent, or deferred consumption. Methods of saving include putting money aside in, for example, a deposit account, a pension account, an investment fund, or as cash. Saving also involves reducing expenditures, such as recurring costs. In terms of personal finance, saving generally specifies low-risk preservation of money, as in a deposit account, versus investment, wherein risk is a lot higher; in economics more broadly, it refers to any income not used for immediate consumption. Saving does not automatically include interest. Saving differs from savings. The former refers to the act of not consuming one's assets, whereas the latter refers to either multiple opportunities to reduce costs; or one's assets in the form of cash. Saving refers to an activity occurring over time, a flow variable, whereas savings refers to something that exists at any one time, a stock variable. This distinction is often misunderstood, and even professional economists and investment professionals will often refer to "saving" as "savings". In different contexts there can be subtle differences in what counts as saving. For example, the part of a person's income that is spent on mortgage loan principal repayments is not spent on present consumption and is therefore saving by the above definition, even though people do not always think of repaying a loan as saving. However, in the U.S. measurement of the numbers behind its gross national product (i.e., the National Income and Product Accounts), personal interest payments are not treated as "saving" unless the institutions and people who receive them save them. Saving is closely related to physical investment, in that the former provides a source of funds for the latter. By not using income to buy consumer goods and services, it is possible for resources to instead be invested by being used to produce fixed capital, such as factories and machinery. Saving can therefore be vital to increase the amount of fixed capital available, which contributes to economic growth. However, increased saving does not always correspond to increased investment. If savings are not deposited into a financial intermediary such as a bank, there is no chance for those savings to be recycled as investment by business. This means that saving may increase without increasing investment, possibly causing a short-fall of demand (a pile-up of inventories, a cut-back of production, employment, and income, and thus a recession) rather than to economic growth. In the short term, if saving falls below investment, it can lead to a growth of aggregate demand and an economic boom. In the long term if saving falls below investment it eventually reduces investment and detracts from future growth. Future growth is made possible by foregoing present consumption to increase investment. However, savings not deposited into a financial intermediary amount to an (interest-free) loan to the government or central bank, who can recycle this loan. In a primitive agricultural economy, savings might take the form of holding back the best of the corn harvest as seed corn for the next planting season. If the whole crop were consumed the economy would convert to hunting and gathering the next season.貯蓄（ちょちく、英: savings）とは、蓄えることであるが、経済学においては色々な定義があり、主なものとして以下のものがある。不動産を含めるか、金融資産を含めるかどうかで金額は大きく変わることに注意。 1.
* 投資を含む：現金・預金・投資（金融資産や不動産など）・年金・保険などにより資産を蓄えること。 2.
* 流動資産のみ：現金・預金（普通預金や定期預金など）・金融資産（株や投資信託や債券など）・保険により資産を蓄えること。不動産と年金は含めない。 3.
* 投資を除く：現金・預金（普通預金など）により資産を蓄えること。 投資を含む用法は、内閣府の国民経済計算の家計貯蓄率などで使われている。資産のリスク性などを考慮に入れず貯蓄とする用法である。所得=消費+税金+貯蓄 の関係にある。 流動資産のみの用法は、総務省統計局の家計調査で使われている。不動産や年金は含まないため、確定拠出年金や小規模企業共済なども貯蓄に含まれない。 投資を除く用法は、貯金と似た意味に使われており、ほぼ無リスクで直ぐに消費に回せる資産だけに限定した用法である。例えば、2001年に小泉純一郎内閣が「貯蓄から投資へ」というスローガンを掲げたが、この時の貯蓄は預金の事をさしている。 更には、リスク性のある金融資産の貯蓄のことだけをさす用法もあり、知るぽるとの発表している「家計の金融行動に関する世論調査」の統計データに対して、不動産・普通預金・年金などしか資産を持っていない世帯を「貯蓄ゼロ世帯」と呼ぶ用法もある。これは正しくは「リスクのある金融資産ゼロ世帯」である。 (Source: http://dbpedia.org/resource/Saving) |
