The savings rate in Portugal is around 10% of disposable income but should be double that level, is one key finding of a University of Minho study, commissioned by the Portuguese Insurance Association and released Tuesday.

Study coordinator, Fernando Alexandre, said the Portuguese savings rate had dropped from 24% of disposable income in 1985 to 10% by the late 1990s and since then has remained stable at that level.

“In Portugal, almost nobody saves, just a small slice of the population, while in Germany, for example, everybody saves,” Alexandre highlighted.

He then attributed this drop in the savings rate as 80% due to households and 20% due to companies.

The study also points out that the “strong and sustained reduction in the Portuguese economy’s savings rate in recent decades was, through to the international financial crisis, broadly ignored by all specialists and political decision makers.”

Indeed, one conclusion points out that the countries facing the worst of the ongoing sovereign debt crisis all shared declining savings rates and that all solutions to the aforementioned crisis “will have to involve the recovery of the importance of saving in both the discourses and practices of the Portuguese.”