This paper focuses on the developing countries, which accounted for nearly half the value of those surpluses, were apparently unable to find sufficiently profitable investments at home that overcame market and political risk. The United States a decade ago likely could not have run up today's...

In this paper a general equilibrium intertemporal model with optimizing consumers and producers is developed to analyze how the imposition of a temporary import tariff affects the path of real exchange rates and the current account. The model is completely real, and considers a small open...

This paper examines the extent of international financial integration, and its consequences for the current account. The evidence indicates that financial liberalization in the 1970s and 1980s has resulted in a substantial movement towards closer integration of world capital markets. By reducing...

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...

The IMF, in cooperation with other concerned organizations, set up a working party to investigate and improve the statistical procedures being used, and to recommend compilation procedures that would make nations' balance of payments statistics more consistent with one another. In addition to...

This year’s report provides the external sector assessment of 30 of the world’s largest economies on the basis of their 2023 data. With tight monetary policy conditions in key advanced economies continuing in 2023, the US dollar remained strong in 2023 and early 2024 by historical standards,...

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...