Do the U.S. have a current account surplus or a deficit with the EU? Since 2009, official sources disagree: The U.S. Department of Commerce claims a consistent U.S. surplus while Eurostat reports the opposite. International transactions are notoriously difficult to measure accurately, but the size of the transatlantic discrepancy is extremely substantial: over the last ten years, it has grown to accumulated 1 Trillion USD. In times of severe trade policy disagreements across the Atlantic, this gap is obviously problematic. This paper tries to dissect the transatlantic reporting gap. Two country-pairs - U.S.-UK and U.S.-Netherlands - account for almost the entire transatlantic discrepancy, which, in 2017, stood at about 180 billion USD. In the former case, national statistics on net services trade disagree by as much as 55 billion USD; in the latter case, there is a reporting difference in net primary income of about 60 billion USD. In contrast, data provided by the Bundesbank for the German-U.S. current account closely mirror U.S. data. Non-random measurement error and, possibly, deliberate manipulation seem to cause the observed discrepancies.

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我们对跨大西洋经常账户有什么真正了解？

美国对欧盟有经常账户盈余或赤字吗？自2009年以来，官方消息不同意：美国商务部声称美国持续盈余，而欧盟统计局则相反。众所周知，国际交易难以准确计量，但跨大西洋差异的规模却极为巨大：在过去十年中，其累计规模已达到1万亿美元。在整个大西洋地区严重的贸易政策分歧时期，这种差距显然是有问题的。本文试图剖析跨大西洋的报告差距。美英两国和美荷兰两国这两个国家对几乎构成了整个大西洋差异，2017年约为1800亿美元。在前一种情况下，国家有关净服务贸易的统计数据相差550亿美元。在后一种情况下，报告的净基本收入相差约600亿美元。相比之下，德国央行为德美经常账户提供的数据与美国数据非常相似。非随机测量误差以及可能的故意操纵似乎会导致观察到的差异。