#trade-balance

Whether each economy earns more from the rest of the world than it spends — the current-account balance, live from the OECD's official balance-of-payments statistics, no key. The current account is the single most important external-balance number in macro: it nets a country's trade in goods and services, its cross-border investment income, and its transfers into one figure. A surplus means the economy is a net lender to the world and is accumulating foreign claims; a deficit means it is a net borrower, financing its spending with foreign capital. Persistent current-account positions are one of the deepest drivers of exchange rates — surplus currencies (the yen, the euro-area core, the Nordics) tend to be structurally supported, while large-deficit currencies depend on continued capital inflows and are vulnerable when risk appetite turns. The board endpoint ranks economies by their current-account balance as a share of GDP — the size-neutral cross-country screen — from biggest surpluses to biggest deficits. The goods endpoint ranks by the merchandise (goods) trade balance as a share of GDP, separating the trade story from services and income. The country endpoint gives one economy's full external decomposition: the headline balance as a share of GDP, the goods / services / primary-income / secondary-income balances in US dollars (which sum exactly to the current account) and as shares of GDP, the six-quarter trend, and a plain-language read of whether the position is improving or deteriorating and what drives it. Each reading carries its own quarter and discontinued series are filtered out. This is the external-balance / balance-of-payments cut — distinct from trade growth (real export and import growth rates, the flow of volumes, not the net balance), and from the inflation, labour-cost and confidence feeds. The headline is percent of GDP; the decomposition is in billions of US dollars per quarter and percent of GDP; figures are quarterly, seasonally adjusted.

api.oanor.com/currentaccount-api