BRATISLAVA, December 22, (WEBNOVINY) — Slovak households started saving as never before after the crisis in 2009, says the National Bank of Slovakia in its monthly review. Slovaks started preferring saving over consumption and while nominal income in early 2010 grew, consumption stagnated and the savings rate increased by some ten percent.
“Slovakia has not yet recorded such level of household saving in its short history. Therefore, a question emerges in what products households placed the saved money,” writes the central bank. The trend of savings and financial assets developed in the same way over the past quarters but there was a gap since the first quarter of 2010.
This might indicate that households placed the saved finances not only in financial assets but also in other tangible assets, for example precious metals, or transferred them abroad in the form of bank deposits, investments in foreign securities or used them to purchase foreign real state, suggests the report.
Another factor behind this development can be that the statistics of sales does not detect the fast growth of Internet shops and thus reported retail sales are undervalued, suggests the central bank. According to last data of the Statistics Office, retail sales lagged behind 3.1 percent annually even in October of this year. For the whole of 2010, retail sales dropped 2.2 percent to EUR 17.3 billion.
SITA
