Abstract: The Flow of Funds published by National Bureau of Statistics provides a basic framework to study government savings. However, fiscal surplus(deficit) based on business accounting is different from the concept of government savings, which is based on the national accounting. There are both differences and links between the two concepts. In accordance with the compilation principles of the flow of funds table and the basic principles of fiscal analysis, this paper constructs a fiscal perspective decomposition framework of government savings through the classification and integration of the calculation process of government savings, and associate government savings with fiscal and tax. Moreover, on the basis of constituent items of government savings, we compared China’s government savings with the United Kingdom, Germany, the United States, Japan and South Korea. Our research indicates that government saving rate in China has increased from 4.83% in 1998 to 11.98% in 2008. The international comparisons results show that, the main reasons for China’s high government savings rate are low government consumption and high tax burden(excluding social insurance contributions). In addition, low social security benefits and social assistance spending also provides a partial explanation.
