Loukas and his co-author also find the second explanation difficult to reconcile with the data, as investment spending on unmeasured capital would need to be implausibly large to account for factorless income. It is the third potential explanation that turns out to be the most promising.
In particular, we could not find, for Italy, the dissaving at old ages observed for other countries, and attributed this result to the system of social security and the family structure prevailing in the country. The Survey’s micro-data have later become a precious source to investigate consumption and saving.