FAQ: How big is the U.S. current account deficit compared to other countries?
The U.S. current account deficit is the largest in the world in absolute size. However, the dollar amount of the current account deficit can be deceiving, because the U.S. is the largest economy in the world. A better comparison is to compare the size of the current account deficit/surplus to a country’s GDP. By doing this we put the deficit in comparable terms across countries. The following table shows the current account deficit/surplus for selected coun-tries in 2010. The table shows that the U.S. does not have the largest current account deficit as a fraction of GDP. The countries with serious current account problems are: Greece, Portugal and Iceland. All of those countries have already had to ask for help from the IMF. In contrast, some countries have very large surpluses. Both Norway and Switzerland have current account surpluses that exceed 10% of their GDP.