The Balance of Payments Textbook, like the Balance of Payments Compilation Guide, is a companion document to the fifth edition of the Balance of Payments Manual. The Textbook provides illustrative examples and applications of concepts, definitions, classifications, and conventions contained in the Manual and affords compilers with opportunities for enhancing their understanding of the relevant parts of the Manual. The Textbook is one of the main reference materials for training courses in balance of payments methodology.

A companion document to the fifth edition of the Balance of Payments Manual, the Balance of Payments Compilation Guide shows how the conceptual framework described in the Manual may be implemented in practice. The primary purpose of the Guide is to provide practical guidance for using sources and methods to compile statistics on the balance of payments and the international investment position. the Guide is designed to assist balance of payments compilers and statisticians in understanding the relative strengths and weaknesses of various approaches. The material reflects the emergence of new data sources and adaptations in the application of statistical methodologies to changing circumstances. Discussed in the Guide are all of the tasks that a BOP compiler normally performs. Appendices contain a set of model BOP questionnaires and a set of model BOP publication tables. Relationships between the balance of payments statistics and relevant aspects of national accounts are covered as well.

This paper explains contribution of the September 1949 devaluations to the solution of Europe’s dollar problem. After the devaluations, the dollar value of exports to the United States from the devaluing countries in Europe recovered from the low levels of the second and third quarters of 1949, but this recovery, which restored exports in the first half of 1950 approximately to the 1948 level should be attributed in large part to the recovery in the US economy rather than to the devaluations. Between the first half of 1949 and the first half of 1950, Europe's dollar imports declined by one-third. Most of this decline occurred, however, between the second and third quarter of 1949, that is, before the devaluations. With imports generally controlled, the effect of the devaluations appeared much more in the reduction of pressure on the control authorities, the substitution of the price mechanism for at least part of the controls as barriers to imports, and the consequent more rational allocation of the relatively scarce dollars among different uses and different users.

This paper focuses on the developing countries, which accounted for nearly half the value of those surpluses, were apparently unable to find sufficiently profitable investments at home that overcame market and political risk. The United States a decade ago likely could not have run up today’s near $800 billion annual deficit for the simple reason that we could not have attracted the foreign savings to finance it. In 1995, for example, total cross-border saving was less than $300 billion. The long-term updrift in this broader swath of unconsolidated deficits and mostly offsetting surpluses of economic entities has been persistent but gradual for decades, probably generations. However, the component of that broad set that captures only the net foreign financing of the imbalances of the individual US economic entities, our current account deficit, increased from negligible in the early 1990s to 6.2 percent of our GDP by 2006.

This book collects together the basic documents of an approach to the theory and policy of the balance of payments developed in the 1970s. The approach marked a return to the historical traditions of international monetary theory after some thirty years of departure from them – a departure occasioned by the international collapse of the 1930s, the Keynesian Revolution and a long period of war and post-war reconstruction in which the international monetary system was fragmented by exchange controls, currency inconvertibility and controls over international trade and capital movements.

This book is a theoretical investigation of the influence of human learning on the development through time of a 'pure labour' economy. The theory proposed is a simple one, but aims to grasp the essential features of all industrial economies. Economists have long known that two basic phenomena lie at the root of long-term economic movements in industrial societies: capital accumulation and technical progress. Attention has been concentrated on the former. In this book, by contrast, technical progress is assigned the central role. Within a multi-sector framework, the author examines the structural dynamics of prices, production and employment (implied by differentiated rates of productivity growth and expansion of demand) against a background of 'natural' relations. He also considers a number of institutional problems. Institutional and social learning, know-how, and the diffusion of knowledge emerge as the decisive factors accounting for the success and failure of industrial societies.

In the late 1990s, international statistical experts confirmed that financial derivatives should be treated as financial assets and that transactions in financial derivatives should be reported as separate transactions rather than as integral parts of the values of underlying transactions or of financial assets to which some derivatives are linked as hedges. Therefore, to parallel revisions made to the System of National Accounts (1993), an addendum and amendments to the fifth edition (1993) of the Balance of Payments Manual (BPM5) were prepared and published, in early 2000, as a supplement entitled Financial Derivatives. This supplement comprises two parts. Part I contains a new chapter in which the features of financial derivatives and treatments appropriate for specific derivatives were described. Part II consists of modifications to those portions of the BPM5 that pertain to financial derivatives. The revisions are shown by means of shading and strikeout. Financial Derivatives is an essential component of the BPM5.