Abstract:
Household saving is a crucial determinant
of welfare as it has a smoothening effect on unforeseen
fluctuations in income. Though, many factors can shape
up the saving behavior, this study mainly focuses on
demographic factors, with the aim to delineate their
effect on household savings. A questionnaire method
was used to collect data from 500 households under a
survey method. With the objective of finding out the
association of Age, Sex, Region, Education, Family Size,
Marital Status, Family Type, Job Categories, Type of
Village, Religion, Age At Marriage, House owner ship,
Number of Earners, Number of Non-Earners on savings,
this study applied One way ANOVA (F test) for Earner
and Non- Earner variables and non - parametric tests
such as Kruskal-Wallis Test and Jonkheere- Terpstra
Test for the others as they showed non-linearity which
calls for non- parametric tests. The test results revealed
that the mean household Savings does significantly differ
across different Regions of the Jaffna District, Level of
Education of the Head, Job categories of the Head, Type
of Village, Religion, Age at Marriage, Number of Earners,
and Number of Non-Earners. Meanwhile, savings does
not differ significantly across Age, Sex, Family size,
marital status, and Family type. Hence null hypotheses
were accepted for these variables that there were no
apparent differences in saving across these five variables.
Since saving is a tool for development Initiatives, these
findings would be of policy significance to Jaffna District
while formulating policies to improve personal saving
behavior or to develop product and policies to promote
regular savings.
