Countries in the hamster’s wheel?: Nurkse-Duesenberry demonstration effects and the determinants of saving.

Throughout the world, stable regional patterns relating to private savings are hard to access. This article revisits the hypothesis that, as there is evidence of emula-tion  patterns  between  consumers,  there  might  be  international  (macroeconomic)  “emulation”. We test demonstration effect theories exploiting international data on savings, incomes, and means of global exposure. We use two methods of media communication given that their penetration peaked at different times in the sample  period:  TV  and  internet  were  a  means  of  discovering  foreign  consumption  standards. With the resulting country panels, we find some evidence in favour of a statistically significant negative association for the demonstration effect.