Suchergebnisse

If for any national income and its given distribution we could estimate the amount of annual savings, we should be able to tell how much investment is necessary to make the aggregate receipts of entrepreneurs (plus the value of any additions to the inventories) equal to their outlay and thus avoid entrepreneurs' losses and shrinkage of output, and keep national income at a given level.The relationship between national income and savings has been estimated in three ways: (1) by studying the relationship between incomes and savings of families, leaving the undistributed corporation incomes out of the picture; (2) by studying separately savings of wage-earners and of profit-receivers out of their respective incomes (distributed or not); (3) by confronting, through time, national income and investment. Only the first method will be discussed here.If people adjusted their behaviour to changes in their income more quickly than they actually do, the family budget statistics could give an answer as to how a change in the total national income affects the national savings, apart from the undistributed profits of corporations. Actually, there is probably a time lag between income changes and changes in consumption and savings, which should be studied separately.