86th International Atlantic Economic Conference

October 11 - 14, 2018 | New York, USA

Saving intentions and behaviour of international university students

Saturday, 13 October 2018: 3:00 PM
Zsuzsanna Szeles, Ph.D. , Institute of Economics, Budapest Metropolitan University, Budapest, Hungary
Zoltan Szabo, Ph.D. , Marketing Department, Budapest Business University of Applied Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
Our main goal was to show saving intentions of the young generation especially to examine international university students’ behavior. A lot of different kinds of factors can influence the savings of the young generation. We have chosen a special age group of young people attending university because we think their saving decision making will influence the future in the different countries they are from.

The savings are the base of the economy and the engine of the growth of the economy. The role of savings has always been an important area of economics and economic analyses at any given time. The aims of the research are as follows: mapping the gross savings and form of savings, the young generation’s point of view on the importance of saving. These are crucially important for concluding the influencing factors for the next generation of the labor force and decision makers of the society. Hungary became an attractive destination for foreign students. This is to be observed during the last years. There has not been a study that is focusing on this subject yet.

A questionnaire survey was conducted at Hungarian universities. We asked international undergraduate university students from more than 20 foreign Universities who study in Hungary about their saving behavior and would like to demonstrate that saving decisions are influenced by tradition, origin, education, country specifications and sociocultural aspects. The primary questions were divided into 3 larger sections including general information, financial background, saving attitudes and saving decision criteria. We received more than 150 questionnaires. The secondary source of data is the Eurostat and OECD. As the first step we make a regression analysis to measure relationships then with multivariable analysis we can create groups of saving intentions of international students.

The expected results focus on the factors influencing the young university student generation regarding how they plan and what their intentions are with their savings in different countries.