A Divisia type saving aggregate for India

Indian financial sector reforms initiated in 1991-92 have significantly affected user costs of assets and have resulted in significant substitution among them. Thus there is a need to develop a measure of savings that reflects household choice over assets more accurately than the simple sum. An advantage of monetary aggregates that are based on microtheoretic foundations, for example, the Divisia index, is that no a priori assumptions about asset substitutability need be imposed. We construct Divisia subaggregates of the financial assets component of Indian household savings and an overall aggregate of financial savings and demonstrate their superiority to the simple sum constructs.