In recent decades, the household/personal sector and the (non-financial) corporate sector have both been tending to move into sizeable surplus, for the reasons just explained. It is thus just a matter of arithmetic to show that, in order to maintain macro-economic equilibrium, the public sector had to move into a balancing deficit. For individual countries, however, such a deficit would be more, or less, dependent on whether they were running a current account deficit (i.e. the Rest of the World was also in surplus), or surplus. Countries with large current account surpluses, such as Germany,
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