The world distribution of current account balances has been steadily drifting away from “normality” since 1997. This puzzling development has occurred in parallel with large scale accumulation of official foreign reserve assets in emerging Asia and commodity exporting countries, and a...

The purpose of this paper is to cast a new light on the present state of global current account imbalances. As a first step, we compute the world distribution of current account balances, in order to highlight its historically-unprecedented pattern, both in terms of the size of imbalances, its...