Category: Sourcing

Key points

• Balance of payment and overseas investment position figures are available on a monthly and quarterly basis.
• Annual statistics on international services trade;
• Year figures on external direct placement, transactions, and earnings;
• Data on worldwide exchanges involving EU institutions in great detail.

 Present Account

The present account is made up of a nation’s net goods and services trade, net income on cross-border investments, and net transfer payments.

The History behind account

Because development was slow at the period, creating a trade surplus was the major means of bolstering a country’s financial situation. However, because national economies were not highly connected, large trade imbalances seldom resulted in crises.

 Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was a period of growth in the second half of the eighteenth century that changed EU’s and America’s mostly rural and agrarian cultures into industrialized and urbanized society.

Thanks to the development of new machinery and techniques in textiles, ironmaking, and other sectors, goods that were formerly painstakingly manufactured by hand began to be mass-produced by machines in factories.

The Industrial Revolution began in Britain and extended to the rest of the globe, including the United States, in the 1830s and 1840s, fueled by the game-changing usage of steam. This time is commonly referred to as the first industrial revolution by historians to distinguish it from a later phase of industrialisation that began in the late 1800s. Rapid advancements in the steel, electrical, and automobile sectors occurred during the 19th and early 20th centuries. During this time, the world economy discovered that each country was superior in terms of production, time, and price for various products and services.

This was the point at which countries began to specialize in a specific field.

End of gold standard

Countries abandoned the old system during the Great Depression and engaged in competitive depreciation of their money, but the Bretton Woods system, which lasted from 1945 until the 1970s, introduced a new system where the dollar can be converted into gold with exchange rates based on other currencies.

The government was unable to properly redeem foreign central banks’ dollar holdings for gold as the US money supply grew and the trade imbalance widened, and the system was abandoned.

Great Downturn

Several nations engaged in competitive depreciation of their currencies during the Great Recession in order to promote exports. At the time, all of the world’s major central banks responded to the financial crisis by implementing significant monetary expansion. As a result, the currencies of other countries, particularly those in developing economies, have appreciated versus the US dollar and other major currencies.

Many of these countries responded by relaxing monetary policy even further to assist their exports, particularly those whose exports were hampered by slow global demand during the Great Recession.

The Balance Of Payments in details

The current account and the capital account are the two accounts that the balance of payments separates transactions into. With a separate, generally very tiny, capital account reported separately, the capital account is sometimes referred to as the financial account. Transactions in products, services, investment income, and current transfers are all included in the current account.

Imports and Exports transactions

Imports and exports of commodities, services, and capital, as well as transfer payments like foreign aid and remittances, make up the balance of payments (BOP). The international accounts are made up of a country’s balance of payments and its net foreign investment position.

Foreign funds are classified as credit and documented in the Balance Of Payments when they enter a nation. In the BOP, outflows from a nation are reflected as debits. Let’s assume France sends 100 vehicles to the United States. The export of the 100 automobiles is recorded as a negative in France’s balance sheet, while the imports are recorded as a credit in the United States’.

Sum of all exchanges

Statistical disparities exist in practice as a result of the difficulties of precisely counting every transaction between one economy and the rest of the world, including differences created by foreign currency translations.

As long as the capital account is defined widely, the aggregate of all exchanges reported in the balance of payments must be zero. The reason for this is that every credit in the current account has an equal and opposite debit in the capital account.

Calculations and components of Balance of Payments

The calculation method is always the same, this is a simple calculation where the result needs to be close to 0.

BOP formula

Current account + capital account + financial account + balancing item = 0 is the formula for determining the balance of payments.