June 18, 2014 2:00pm by David Farrar

Largest ever unadjusted current account surplus

New Zealand’s seasonally adjusted current account balance was a deficit of $0.6 billion in the March 2014 quarter, Statistics New Zealand said today. This is $0.3 billion smaller than the December 2013 quarter deficit.

An increase in the value of goods exports, combined with higher spending by overseas visitors to New Zealand contributed to the fall in the current account deficit this quarter.

“The smaller deficit follows last quarter’s $1.6 billion fall, making this the smallest current account deficit since 2010,” international statistics manager Jason Attewell said.

Before removing seasonal effects, the current account balance was a surplus of $1.4 billion – the largest actual current account surplus ever recorded.

I’m pretty sure Labour have been going on about the current account crisis for a while, so we should thank them for curing this also.

New Zealand’s annual current account was a deficit of $6.3 billion (2.8 percent of GDP) for the year ended March 2014. This compares with a deficit of $7.6 billion (3.4 percent of GDP) for the year ended December 2013, and is also $2.0 billion smaller than the deficit for the year ended March 2013, when it was 3.9 percent of GDP.

So it is now 2.8% of GDP. What has it been?

tradingeconomics.com

This doesn’t include the latest quarter but one can see that the deficit is now less than a third of what it was under Labour, as a proportion of GDP.