M.Comm. (Economics) / The purpose of this study is to examine the pattern of gross domestic saving in South Africa. This study looks at gross domestic saving in South Africa in general and the trends of its components in particular. It addresses the impacts of internal and external policies on the disaggregated domestic saving in South Africa. This is done with the aim of establishing the channels through which these policies influence the components of South Africa’s domestic saving. This study focuses on current economic literature while examining gross domestic saving and its attributes. A brief discussion of gross domestic saving on emerging market region puts sub-Saharan Africa’s gross domestic saving, particularly that of South Africa, into perspective. Hence, the developments in South Africa’s domestic saving are compared with those of some selected countries. An analysis of gross domestic saving in South Africa for the period 1970 to 2004 indicates a long-run downward pattern. The disaggregated domestic saving in South Africa shows that although three components contributed to the decline in South Africa’s domestic saving, the public sector appeared to be the main culprit in the decline. Thus, the net saving by the government had been negative since early 1980. The study observes that the patterns of saving of the three components are influenced by both internal and external factors. iv These internal and external factors are made up of fiscal and monetary policies, and the balance of payments. Without over-emphasising the importance of gross domestic saving in any economy, it is crucial for South Africa to encourage a positive saving culture for improvement in meaningful domestic investment for long-term economic growth. This study, therefore, suggests that in a developing economy like the South African economy, a positive saving attitude could be encouraged through the use of internal and external policies. Hence, the positive impact of internal and external factors could motivate all stakeholders in gross domestic saving to seize any available opportunity to boost their savings, thereby raising South Africa’s gross domestic saving.

The fact that saving is one of the main factors to economic growth is unquestionable. Accumulated saving can be consider as the sources of capital stock to which play a crucial role in creating investment, production, and employment. And all these activities eventually enhance the economic growth. Therefore the main objective of this paper, ―The relationship between domestic saving and economic growth and convergence hypothesis: case study of Thailand‖, was to investigate the causality relationship between the domestic saving and economic growth of Thailand. This paper will analyze whether the direction of causality go from domestic saving to economic growth, or vice versa. Granger causality test were conducted by using time series annual data from 1960 to 2010, and the empirical result suggests that the direct of causality go from economic growth to domestic saving only. Aiming to grow its economy, Thailand had had development plans which used both saving and direct investment to stimulate economy. This paper examine whether the convergence hypothesis does hold in Thailand. This part would check whether or not Thailand is in the process of convergence, catching up, lagging behind, loose catching up, loose lagging behind or divergence over time compared with other developed countries. This test was conducted in pairwise between Thailand-Singapore, Thailand-United States, Thailand-United Kingdom, deployed data from 1970 to 2010, and the Augmented Dickey–Fuller (ADF) Test. The regression results demonstrate that convergence hypothesis does not hold in Thailand. Finally, the result of Granger Causality report that economic growth rate does matter lead to growth rate of domestic savings in Thailand only. Thus, in order to learn the effect of gross domestic saving per capita growth rate can help narrow the different of GDP between two countries concerned, this paper will examine the correlation of two variables, deployed the OSL methods to investigate the correlation between gross domestic saving growth rate and the different of GDP per capita between Thailand and Singapore. This test also examine whether saving does help support convergence hypothesis for Thailand or not. The test results shows that domestic saving growth rate does not help narrowing the range of different of income of Thailand and Singapore which mean that domestic saving growth rate does not support the convergence hypothesis in Thailand.