Japan and China may be the whales amongst the world's savers, but their surpluses add up to only about 40% of America's saving deficit. The rest comes from a shoal of smaller fish. Most are emerging economies, particularly in Asia and the Middle East. These countries are piling up current-account surpluses for different reasons. Saving in oil-exporting countries has soared, and private-sector investment in emerging Asia outside China has collapsed. The role of oil prices in today's global imbalances is often overlooked, but surplus saving in oil-exporting countries, as a group, is now the biggest counterpart to America's deficit. In 2004, when the oil price averaged $40 a barrel, oil exporters ran a collective saving surplus of $207 billion, almost three times as much as in 2001. So far this year, oil prices have soared, and the IMF now expects the oil exporters' collective surpluses for 2005 to be almost $400 billion. That should not come as a surprise. A sudden windfall of wealth from a "terms-of-trade shock" initially tends to be saved not spent, and national saving rates in oil-exporting countries have recently shot up (see chart 10).
展开▼
