Current-Account Asymmetries in U.S.–EU Statistics

The United States and the European Union are the foremost trading partners in the world, with total bilateral current-account transactions exceeding $1.8 trillion in 2017, as reported by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) and the Statistical Office of the European Union (Eurostat). In 2017, the 28 Member States of the European Union accounted for more than 26 percent of U.S. current-account transactions, while the United States accounted for more than 23 percent of EU current-account transactions with countries outside the EU (extra–EU). The current account, a major component of a country’s balance of payments accounts, shows economic transactions of an economy with the rest of the world and provides valuable information about how economies are intertwined globally. Persistent bilateral asymmetries—differences in the statistics reported by the United States and the EU Member States—have led to questions about the interpretation of the statistics by data users.