The Relationship Between Saving and Credit from a Schumpeterian Perspective

Mainstream economic theory underlines the close relation between saving decisions and credit supply: the saving decisions determine the credit supply and thus the investment flow carried out by all firms. This paper has two objectives: 1) to highlight the theoretical limits of this causal sequence on the basis of the arguments developed by Schumpeter, who instead maintains that in a capitalist economy the credit supply and investment decisions are independent of saving decisions; and 2) to show that Schumpeter's analysis provides many arguments that make it possible to justify the importance of the elements that characterize the institutional-evolutionary approach.