X-Nico

3 unusual facts about Balance of payments


Balance of payments

Brazil's finance minister Guido Mantega declared that an "international currency war" has broken out, with countries competitively trying to devalue their currency so as to boost exports.

China has been requested to allow the renminbi to appreciate but until 2010 had refused, the position expressed by her premier Wen Jiabao being that by keeping the value of the renmimbi stable against the dollar China has been helping the global recovery, and that calls to let her currency rise in value have been motivated by a desire to hold back China's development.

According to economics writer Martin Wolf, in the eight years leading up to 2007, "three-quarters of the foreign currency reserves accumulated since the beginning of time have been piled up".


Pietro Verri

This was followed by the Meditazioni sull'economia politica ("Meditations on Economic Politics", 1771), where he enunciated the laws regulating supply and demand (also in mathematical form), explained the role of money as "universal good", and supported laissez-faire in trade, arguing that balance of payments equilibrium is achieved by GDP adjustments rather than by exchange rate adjustments; as such, he was a precursor of both Adam Smith and marginalism.


see also

Anthony Thirlwall

Perhaps his most notable contribution has been to show that if long-run balance of payments equilibrium is a requirement for a country, its growth of national income can be approximated by the ratio of the growth of exports to the income elasticity of demand for imports (Thirlwall's Law).

Myer Rashish

In 1960-61, President-elect of the United States John F. Kennedy named Rashis secretary of his Task Force on Foreign Economic Policy and the Task Force on the Balance of Payments.