Irish households' gross saving ratio for 2017 stands at 8.6 pct

DUBLIN, April 11 (Xinhua) -- The gross saving ratio of Irish households in 2017 stood at 8.6 percent, up 1.8 percentage points compared with 2016, according to the data released by the country's national statistics bureau on Wednesday.

Last year the gross saving of the Irish households totalled 8.846 billion euros (about 10.94 billion U.S. dollars), up 33.24 percent from the 6.639 billion euros recorded in 2016, said Central Statistics Office of Ireland (CSO) in a report on its website.

The sharp rise in the country's households' gross saving was mainly due to the fact that last year Irish households's gross income grew faster than their total expenditure on goods and services, said CSO.

In 2017 the total disposable income of Irish households amounted to 99.976 billion euros, up 5.34 percent from 94.906 billions in 2016 while their total spending on goods and services stood at 91.13 billion euros, up 3.24 percent from 88.267 billion euros in the previous year, said CSO, adding that the growth rate of income outpaced that of expenditure by 2.1 percentage points.

Households' gross saving ratio refers to the percentage of their total savings in their total disposal income.

The 2017 Irish households' gross saving ratio is lower than its actual calculation probably due to rounding.

CSO said the 2017 saving and spending figures for Irish households are preliminary and could be subject to revision. (1 euro=1.237 U.S. dollars) Enditem