At 11:14 AM 95.6.27 +0000, Anthony M. Miyake wrote:

>The problem with the saving-money-to-buy-a-house theory is that the decision to
plan to buy a house is itself a savings decision (it is endogenous, not
exogenous).

Public policy is an exogenous variable that goes far to explain high savings rates. I made the argument in the _Journal of Japanese Studies_, Vol. 16, No. 2, Winter 1990 in an article entitled "The Political Economy of Japanese Saving:
How Postal Savings and Public Pensions Support High Rates of Household Saving in Japan." Kent Calder also had a piece in the same issue on the institutional reasons that support the postal savings system.

Michael Smitka informs me that among the economists in the US working on Japan, several "do" savings: Fumio Hayashi at Columbia, Robert Dekle of BU (now at the FRB), and Kazuo Sato at Rutgers. Charles Horioka is at the Osaka University Economics Institute has also review the state of such studies in "Why is Japan's Savings Rate So High? A Literature Survey" _Journal of Japanese and International Economies_ 4:1 (1990), 49-92 according to Smitka.

Stephen Anderson
International University of Japan