Working Papers

Savings provides the means for investments. Typically, investments are primarily funded through domestic savings and the rest through foreign capital inflows. Domestic savings are from three sources — households, private and public sector. Household savings form the largest part of total savings. As domestic savings contributes the most to capital formation, it can also be a limiting factor to investments. The paper deals with changing pattern of Household savings, its shift away from capital (financial) markets towards unproductive assets like gold and possibilities of channelization household savings to investment rather than speculative assets. The paper looks at the current policy incentives in terms of tax to boost capital market investment and whether it has served the purpose of long term capital formation. The current savings environment indicates a high proportion being in physical rather than financial assets. Within financial assets derivatives are preferred over the cash equity. We propose that an investment of incentive structure should support a pyramid where the small investors would hold maximum in the less risky assets and reduce the holdings as they move towards risky assets. Our paper is organized as, section (2) studies trends in current macro-economic scenario in terms of the savings; section (3), deals with, the capital formation and share of capital markets in terms of raising new capital. In section (4), we look at the current investment pattern in Indian capital markets and the incentives provides to boost trading in the equity and derivative products. Section (5) we give our proposal on the layered approach to investment architecture. Finally, section (6) concludes the paper.