Household Savings in Developing Economies: An Annotated Reading List

This reading list presents literature on household savings, and discusses how savings can be expanded in poor and low-income communities. It uses information from the following sources:

• Economics literature that examines the motivation to save and analyzes demand;
• Essays by and for practitioners, which focus mainly on supply;
• Perspectives from historians, anthropologists, sociologists and unaffiliated development scholars, who argue that savings is a social activity.

Topics covered include:

• Global evidence on saving;
• Early advocacy of microsaving;
• Motivations for people to save;
• Saving constraints;
• Close-up of the financial lives of poor people;
• Lessons from behavioral economics;
• Savings innovations and financial literacy;
• Impact studies;
• Building savings institutions and designing savings products;
• Regulating savings.