What Do We Really Know about the Transatlantic Current Account?

Martin Braml and Gabriel Felbermayr

CESifo Economic Studies, 2019, vol. 65, issue 3, 255-274

Abstract: Do the USA have a current account surplus or a deficit with the EU? Since 2009, official sources disagree: The U.S. Department of Commerce claims a consistent US surplus while Eurostat reports the opposite. International transactions are notoriously difficult to measure accurately, but the size of the transatlantic discrepancy is extremely substantial: over the last 10 years, it has grown to a cumulated 1 Trillion USD. In times of severe trade policy disagreements across the Atlantic, this gap is obviously problematic. This article tries to dissect the transatlantic reporting gap. Two country-pairs—USA-UK and USA-Netherlands—account for almost the entire transatlantic discrepancy, which, in 2017, stood at about 180 billion USD. In the former case, national statistics on net services trade disagree by as much as 55 billion USD; in the latter case, there is a reporting difference in net primary income of about 60 billion USD. In contrast, data provided by the Bundesbank for the German-US current account closely mirror US data. Nonrandom measurement error and, possibly, deliberate manipulation seem to cause the observed discrepancies.

Keywords: current account; statistical discrepancies; service trade; trade war (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F14 F32 H26 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/cesifo/ifz012 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: What Do We Really Know about the Transatlantic Current Account? (2019)
Working Paper: What Do We Really Know about the Transatlantic Current Account? (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:cesifo:v:65:y:2019:i:3:p:255-274.

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

CESifo Economic Studies is currently edited by Panu Poutvaara

More articles in CESifo Economic Studies from CESifo Group Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().