The relationship between institutional quality, trust and private savings

International audience ; This paper draws on macroeconomics, the economics of institutions and the economics of trust to explain private savings at the national level for 33 OECD (mostly European) countries from 2002 to 2012. More specifically, it raises two questions: (i) is it the quality of institutions or trust in institutions that drives private savings? (ii) if trust matters, what is the appropriate institutional level at which it operates? To answer these questions, we add to the usual explanatory variables of private savings three measures of institutional quality and six measures of institutional trust, distributed between the following institutional levels, presented in assumed hierarchical order: political, legal, financial and social. We find that trust in political institutions is the most significant driver of private savings. This contributes to the literature underlining the importance of subjectivity in social and economic phenomena and suggests, for private bank savings in countries having highly regulated banking systems, the existence of a hierarchy of trust in which trust in the highest-ranking institutions (political – and to a lesser extent legal – institutions) acts as a substitute for trust in every lower-ranking institution (financial institutions and social trust). ; Cet article s’appuie sur la macroéconomie, l’économie des institutions et l’économie de la confiance pour expliquer l’épargne privée au niveau national dans 33 pays de l’OCDE (pour la plupart européens) de 2002 à 2012. Plus précisément, il soulève deux questions : (i) est-ce la qualité des institutions ou confiance dans les institutions qui stimulent l’épargne privée ? (ii) si la confiance est importante, quel est le niveau institutionnel approprié auquel elle opère ? Pour répondre à ces questions, nous ajoutons aux variables explicatives habituelles de l’épargne privée trois mesures de qualité institutionnelle et six mesures de confiance institutionnelle, réparties entre les niveaux institutionnels suivants, présentés ...