Personal saving in the national income and product accounts (NIPAs) trended downward from the mid-1980s through 2005, falling to 1.5 percent of disposable personal income (DPI) in 2005 (chart 1). In subsequent years, however, the saving rate has trended upward, rising to 5.3 percent in 2010. The personal saving rate is a key indicator of the nation's long-run economic prosperity as well as a measure to help assess the adequacy of household saving for retirement. The long slide in this rate from 1985 to its low in 2005 triggered interest in how personal saving is measured and its relation to broader concepts of national saving. As a result, the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) began periodically publishing a number of alternative measures of saving (table 1).
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