Savings and investment

Gross capital formation and gross savings as a share of GDP.

Gross capital formation, the investment rate, is what a country spends in a year on things that last: buildings, roads, machines, software and additions to stocks, as a share of GDP. Gross savings is the part of national income that is not consumed, which pays for that investment or is lent abroad. When a country invests more than it saves, it borrows the difference from the rest of the world. Both come from the national accounts that each country's statistics office compiles, collected by the World Bank.

• Economy
• National accounts
• Investment
• Savings
• Country
• Year