Barry P. Bosworth

"Longtime Brookings economist and former presidential adviser Barry Bosworth examines why saving rates in the United States have fallen so precipitously over the past quarter century, why the initial consequences were surprisingly benign, and how reduced saving will affect the future well-being of Americans. The Decline in Saving provides an extensive and unparalleled account of the complexity of present saving patterns, an issue made even more serious by the 2008–09 global economic and financial crises. It objectively examines saving at both the individual household and the aggregate economy levels to understand whether the U. S. decline in saving is truly a threat to American prosperity. Highlights from The Decline in Saving:""The magnitude of the two-decade-long fall in household saving has been truly astonishing; it is even more surprising in view of the fact that the large cohort of baby boomers should have been in their peak saving years.""""If Americans save so little, why are they so rich? This divergence emerges because the conventional measure of saving excludes all forms of capital gains....""""Saving behavior appears to be influenced in important ways by country-specific institutional factors along with a few common determinants, such as income growth, demographic changes, and variations in private wealth.""""In the aggregate, the United States has had a negative net national saving rate since the onset of the financial crisis, and it now relies on foreign resource inflows to finance all its capital accumulation and a portion of its consumption.""""The optimistic projections of just a few years ago about the future well-being of retirees now seem seriously dated."""

"The services industries—which include jobs ranging from flipping hamburgers to providing investment advice—can no longer be characterized, as they have in the past, as a stagnant sector marked by low productivity growth. They have emerged as one of the most dynamic and innovative segments of the U. S. economy, now accounting for more than three-quarters of gross domestic product. During the 1990s, 19 million additional jobs were created in this sector, while growth was stagnant in the goods-producing sector. Here, Jack Triplett and Barry Bosworth analyze services sector productivity, demonstrating that fundamental changes have taken place in this sector of the U. S. economy. They show that growth in the services industries fueled the post-1995 expansion in the U. S. productivity and assess the role of information technology in transforming and accelerating services productivity. In addition to their findings for the services sector as a whole, they include separate chapters for a diverse range of industries within the sector, including transportation and communications, wholesale and retail trade, and finance and insurance. The authors also examine productivity measurement issues, chiefly statistical methods for measuring services industry output. They highlight the importance of making improvements within the U. S. statistical system to provide the more accurate and relevant measures essential for analyzing productivity and economic growth. "

"The still chaotic states of the former Soviet Union, a growing China, and the divergent nations of Eastern Europe are striving to radically transform their economies. In their quest to become more integrated with the global economy, they are making historic changes to move toward market-based, private-enterprise systems. In this book, Barry P. Bosworth and Gur Ofer provide a balanced assessment of the progress of integration among the formerly centrally planned economies. So far, the results of the reform process range from amazing success in China to economic and political disarray in the states of the former Soviet Union. The authors outline the key issues that any successful reform program must address and the sequence in which these reforms should take place. A volume of Brookings' Integrating National Economies Series"

The emergence of large trade imbalances among the industrial countries during the 1980s-particularly the massive deficit of the United States and the surpluses of Germany and Japan-has led to growing disenchantment with the international economic system. But while many critics point to unfair trade practices as the cause of these imbalances, others contend that this emphasis is misplaced. In this provocative book by one of the nation's leading economists, Barry Bosworth argues that disparities are not the result of external infraction, but rather a reflection of domestic failures. He shows that the United States, for example, with its large government budget deficit and low rate of private saving, must borrow abroad to finance its investments. Similarly, trade surpluses of countries such as Japan reflect a surplus of national saving over domestic investment, rather than restrictive trade practices. Bosworth explains that large trade imbalances became possible in the 1980s because of the development of an international capital market that greatly reduced the barriers to borrowing and lending across national borders. The result is an international system in which national economies are closely linked through international capital markets as well as trade in goods and services. Using data from the major industrial countries, Bosworth highlights the process by which changes in domestic rates of saving and investment lead to changes in interest rates, exchange rates, and trade balances. He first examines why national saving and investment have fallen throughout the industrialized world. He then focuses on how exchange rates respond to trade imbalances, and considers whether the wide fluctuations in exchange rates are a cause for concern or simply an integral part of the international adjustment to the divergent patterns of national saving and investment.

Examines the effects of rising social security costs and of measures adopted to deal with them, and discusses possible ways of coping with the shortfall of available money for the aging American population.

" The Economics of Federal Credit Programs discusses government lending, government guaranty of loans, and credit control in the United States."

The sharp decline in U. S. productivity growth in the 1970s has brought about a renewed interest in economic policies to expand aggregate supply. Particular importance has been given to the role played by government intervention in the form of taxes, transfer payments, and regulation. This volume asks just what is known about the effect of government policy on the productive capacity of the nation. It also looks at the role played by capital formation, technological change, and the quality of the work force.