48 No.2, Vol. 1, Winter 2012 © 2012 Published by JSES. HOUSEHOLD SAVING IN WESTERN EUROPEAN COUNTRIES. A GENERAL OVERVIEW * Ileana NICULESCU-ARON a , Constanţa MIHĂESCU b Abstract A key factor to economic recovery and development is household saving. Keeping this in mind, the present paper aims at analysing the evolution of the saving rates of selected Western European countries for the period between 1995 and 2011. The focus was on identifying groups of countries with similar saving rates and socio-economic characteristics. Due to the way in which the groups were formed in our analysis, we were able to highlight some similarities within groups and divergences between groups, from which the conclusion that saving behaviour is determined by a combination of economic, social, demographic and cultural factors may be drawn. Keywords: household saving, cluster analysis, determinants of population savings JEL Classification: C10, E21, O52 Authors’ Affiliation a - Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, Romania, Department of Statistics and Econometrics, gabriela_aron@yahoo.com (corresponding author) b - Bucharest Academy of Economic Studies, Romania, Department of Statistics and Econometrics, constanta.mihaescu@gmail.com *An earlier version of this paper was presented at The 6th International Conference on Applied Statistics, November 2012, Bucharest.