A column at The Economist notes that...
In theory, countries’ current-account balances should all sum to zero because one country’s export is another’s import. However, if you add up all countries’ reported current-account transactions... the world exported $331 billion more than it imported in 2010, according to the IMF’s World Economic Outlook. The fund forecasts that the global current-account surplus will rise to almost $700 billion by 2014...
What is going on? Past studies by the IMF concluded that the global deficit in the 1980s and 1990s was largely due to the underreporting of foreign-investment income by rich countries and the under-recording of freight receipts... Another possible explanation posits that the surge in the global discrepancy broadly coincides with both the explosion in vertically integrated businesses, where firms locate different stages of production in different countries... Transfer pricing used by multinationals to shift profits around the globe may distort trade figures...
The good news is that international concerns about global imbalances may be much less pressing than many think. The bad news is that conventional balance-of-payments measures are clearly less reliable in a world of rising intra-firm trade and complex supply chains. That matters because dodgy statistics lead to policy mistakes. Governments should clean the figures up.
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