Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

The balance of payments is a statistical statement that provides a systematic summary of economic transactions of an economy with the rest of the world, for a specific time period. The transactions are for the most part between residents and non-residents of the economy. A transaction is defined as an economic flow that reflects the creation, transformation, exchange, transfer, or extinction of economic value and involves changes in ownership, of goods or assets, the provision of services, labour or capital. This dataset presents economies compiling balance of payments statistics in accordance with the 6th edition of the Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Manual published by the IMF (BPM6). Transactions include: the goods and services accounts, the primary income account (income account in BPM5), the secondary income account (transfers in BPM5), the capital account, and the financial account. All economies disseminated here produce balance of payments according to BPM6; providing strong cross-country comparability. As such the main purpose of this dataset is to provide relevant, reliable, consistent, comparable and timely aggregate quarterly balance of payments statistics for analytical purposes. Nevertheless there are some deviations from standard definitions that are indicated in notes (see « i » attached to series). In the financial account, for net value, a positive sign indicates a net flow from the domestic economy to the rest of the world (a lending to the rest of the world) and a negative sign, a net flow from the rest of the world to the domestic economy (i.e. a net borrowing from the rest of the world). At the level of the sub items (investment abroad investment in the reporting economy etc.), a positive sign indicates an increase of the sub item under consideration and a negative sign a decrease. These conventions are imposed by the BPM6. The dataflow covers : all OECD member countries, G20 economies and a selection of non-member economies. The currency unit used for all series is: Millions of US dollars or Millions of National Currency. OECD statistics contact: [email protected] http://www.oecd.org/sdd