Social security and consumer spending in an international cross section

This paper expands the base of empirical evidence on the social security aggregate private saving issue by examining the behavior of consumer expenditure in 16 industrialized countries over the 1951-60 period. The results are mixed in that time series movements of social security exhibit a positive relation to consumer spending, while the cross-sectional variations reveal a negative association. Our overall conclusion is that the cross-country evidence provides neither empirical support for the hypothesis that social security depresses private saving nor an empirical refutation of that hypothesis. We argue that this indeterminacy of results applies also to previous studies of U.S. time series and to analyses of household cross sections in the U.S.