Economic fluctuations, climate risk and a number of individual specific shocks leave households vulnerable to severe hardship in developing countries. Moreover, the credit and insurance markets are limited and the social coverage is weak. In this context, households saving is crucial to provide an insurance against the economic and social shocks. Additionally, a better knowledge of households saving behaviour could develop the potential to finance investments. This article provides an analysis of microeconomic factors which explain the household savings behaviour in Morocco by using a new survey. Household saving functions are estimated in order to test households' responses to income, monetary or non-monetary wealth and socio-demographic variables in urban and rural areas. Our results confirm that current income strongly affects the saving level whatever the home place. Surprisingly, the household’s size is significant only in the urban case : an additional person reduces the household saving. For the life cycle hypothesis, the results are not significant. Finally, we find that Moroccan women save more than men when we take into account the interaction between gender and income. Nevertheless, for highest income levels, we observe the opposite results. In the case of rural households, there is no statistically significant effect on saving behaviour from the ownership indicators of household’s lands or other real estate. The results suggest that the self financing of rural household activities may be due to the lack of access to formal financial intermediaries.
