This paper presents the views of Lawrence H. Summers on the U.S. current account deficit and the global economy. Summers highlights that the U.S. current account deficit is currently running well in excess of US$600 billion at an annual rate, in the range of 5.5 percent of GDP. It represents...

This paper presents an econometric model of U.S. current account transactions. The model is used to analyze the factors behind the deterioration in the U.S. external position during the 1980s and to examine the sensitivity of the U.S. current account balance to changes in factors which are its...

This paper examines the relationship between fiscal policy and the current account, drawing on a larger country sample than in previous studies and using panel regressions, vector autoregressions, and an analysis of large fiscal and external adjustments. On average, a strengthening in the fiscal...

The External Sector Report presents a methodologically consistent assessment of the exchange rates, current accounts, reserves, capital flows, and external balance sheets of the world's largest economies. The 2018 edition includes an analytical assessment of how trade costs and related policy...

Multilateral Consultations are a new tool of multilateral surveillance for the IMF, designed to foster action-oriented debate and policy actions on a problem of systemic or regional importance. The first multilateral consultation focused on facilitating the resolution of global imbalances while...

This paper studies the effects of demand and supply shocks in the global crude oil market on several measures of countries'' external balance, including the oil and non-oil trade balances, the current account, and changes in net foreign assets (NFA) during 1975-2004. We explicitly take a global...

This paper looks at the question of adequacy of reserves in sub-Saharan African countries in light of the shocks faced by these countries. Literature on optimal reserves so far has not paid attention to the particular shocks facing low-income countries. We use a two-good endowment economy model...

We document external investment positions among European Union countries at the start of the financial crisis through the creation of a new database comprising bilateral external financial asset and liabilities, excluding reserve assets and derivatives. While there are some gaps in the data, the...

After narrowing modestly in 2013, the global scale of current account imbalances, and of excess imbalances, held steady in 2014. Over the last several years, while the country composition of imbalances has rotated somewhat, overall there has been little progress on reducing excess imbalances....

After narrowing in the aftermath of the global financial crisis and remaining broadly unchanged in recent years, global imbalances increased moderately in 2015, amid a reconfiguration of current accounts and exchange rates. Shifts in 2015 were driven primarily by the uneven strength of the...