Working Paper

On the EU-US Current Account

Gabriel Felbermayr, Martin Braml
ifo Institute, Munich, 2018

EconPol Policy Report 7

The first part of this short report uses the newest available data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), an agency of the US Department of Commerce, to analyse economic relations between the US and the EU. The data is used to decompose the components of the US current account balance, and to analyse the bilateral balance of payments with the European Union, the Euro Zone and Germany. In the second part, we use data provided by Eurostat to mirror US figures. We find enormous discrepancies between what the EU and the US report, particularly with respect to primary income.