Taking Italy as their field of research, the contributors conduct a coherent analysis of households' saving behaviour.

The evolution of private saving and its interaction with government fiscal policy play an important and complex role in the development of the national economy. To gain insight into this process, we must first understand the savings behavior of individual households and the ways in which they aggregate over the entire population to produce national saving. Italy provides an ideal laboratory in which to assess the impact of government and private transfer, imperfections in the capital markets, productivity growth and shifting demographic patterns on the saving behavior of individual households...