Our capital account surplus

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A recent Associated Press headline said, "Current account trade deficit posts unexpectedly large improvement." It fell 6 percent.

But why assume that was an improvement? After all, the current account deficit "improved" during every recession, and even moved into surplus during the worst recessions of 1975 and 1980-81.

The Economist's survey of world forecasters estimates the current account deficit will reach 7.3 percent of gross domestic product in Spain this year and 5.6 percent of GDP in Australia. I think the U.S. current account deficit will be about 6 percent. The flip side is that 61/2 percent of GDP measures the difference between foreign investment rushing into America minus U.S. investment flowing abroad. We have a large capital surplus, otherwise known as a current account deficit.

What do countries with large capital account surpluses have in common? Economic growth over the last year was 3.1 percent in Australia, 3 percent in Spain and 3.6 percent in the United States. The expected current account deficit is smaller in the United Kingdom (2.7 percent), yet British economic growth is also slower (2.2 percent). India's current account deficit is running about 2 percent of GDP. By contrast, Germany has a perpetual current account surplus and a pathetic economic growth rate long been stuck close to 1 percent.

Since third-quarter 2003, U.S. exports of goods alone have risen 9.7 percent annually in real terms -- more than double the 4 percent growth of real GDP. Real imports of goods rose 9.2 percent. The U.S. is a big exporter of plastics, aircraft, specialized industrial machinery, scientific instruments, corn, cotton and soybeans. But producing and shipping such products requires importing oil and natural gas.

In April 2006, imported oil and natural gas accounted for 34 percent of the U.S. merchandise trade deficit, not because we guzzled more oil. There was 7 percent less crude oil imported than a year earlier, yet the cost was 18 percent higher.

One of the most persistent myths about semi-free trade or globalization is that countries with trade deficits must be losing manufacturing jobs to countries that run trade surpluses. Japan and Germany have run chronic trade surpluses for many years, particularly in manufactured goods, making it easy to test this theory.

From 1992 to 2005, the Bureau of Labor Statistics says, the number of manufacturing jobs fell 16.3 percent in the United States, from 20.1 million to 16.3 million. But manufacturing jobs fell 24.1 percent in Germany (from 10.7 million to 8.1 million) and by 27.2 percent in Japan (from 15.7 million to 11.4 million).

Chronic trade surpluses were a sign of capital flight, not industrial might. Since 1992, industrial production has increased 11.5 percent in Japan, 18.9 percent in Germany and 59.7 percent in the United States. People in Japan and Germany sold goods to the U.S. to get the dollars needed to invest in the stronger U.S. economy.

So long as people are free to invest wherever they like, global balance is literally impossible. Yet several economists have made careers out of fretting about "global imbalances." They never define current account surpluses as "imbalances," which puts all the emphasis on belt-tightening among vigorously expanding economies, rather than pro-growth policies among the laggards.