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Current Accout Balances Of Countries

This is a list of countries and territories by current account balance, in millions of U.S. dollars, equivalence based on The World Factbook ([1]). Most data are 2006 estimates.

According to this list, 64 countries are in surplus, while 99 countries are in deficit.

Rank	Country	Current account balance (million US$)
1	People's Republic of China (PRC)	179,100
2	Japan	174,400
3	Germany	134,800
4	Russia	105,300
5	Saudi Arabia	103,800
6	Norway	63,330
7	Switzerland	50,440
8	Netherlands	50,170
9	Kuwait	40,750
10	Singapore	35,580
11	Venezuela	31,820
12	Sweden	28,610
13	United Arab Emirates	26,890
14	Algeria	25,800
15	Hong Kong	20,900
16	Canada	20,560
17	Malaysia	17,860
18	Libya	14,500
19	Brazil	13,500
20	Iran	13,130
21	Nigeria	12,590
22	Qatar	12,510
23	Taiwan	9,700
24	Finland	8,749
25	Iraq	8,134
26	Angola	7,700
27	Oman	7,097
28	Belgium	6,925
29	Austria	5,913
30	Argentina	5,810
31	Chile	5,063
32	Denmark	4,941
33	Philippines	4,900
34	Luxembourg	4,630
35	Trinidad and Tobago	3,259
36	Azerbaijan	2,737
37	Egypt	2,697
38	Korea, South	2,000
39	Bahrain	1,999
40	Gabon	1,807
41	Botswana	1,698
42	Yemen	1,690
43	Indonesia	1,636
44	Peru	1,515
45	Israel	1,643
46	Uzbekistan	1,410
47	Burma	1,247
48	Republic of the Congo	1,215
49	Vietnam	1,029
50	Ecuador	727
51	Bolivia	688
52	Papua New Guinea	661
53	Namibia	572
54	Ivory Coast	460
55	Cameroon	419
56	Morocco	389
57	Bangladesh	339
58	Turkmenistan	321.2
59	Equatorial Guinea	175
60	British Virgin Islands	134.3 (1999)
61	Kazakhstan	113
62	Cook Islands	26.67 (2005)
63	Palau	15.09 (2004)
64	Tuvalu	2.323 (1998)
65	Samoa	-2.428 (2004)
66	Tonga	-4.321 (2005)
67	Comoros	-17 (2005)
68	Kiribati	-19.87 (2004)
69	Swaziland	-23.13
70	São Tomé and Príncipe	-24.4
71	Vanuatu	-28.35 (2003)
72	Federated States of Micronesia	-34.3 (2005)
73	Anguilla	-42.87 (2003)
74	Cape Verde	-44.43
75	The Gambia	-54.61
76	Burundi	-57.84
77	Haiti	-58.72
78	Tajikistan	-73.95
79	Lesotho	-75.44
80	Seychelles	-78.59
81	Antigua and Barbuda	-83.4 (2004)
82	Guyana	-84.3
83	Rwanda	-104.1
84	Honduras	-160
85	Zambia	-165.4
86	Republic of Macedonia	-167
87	Belize	-173.4
88	Malawi	-186
89	Ghana	-219
90	Armenia	-247.3
91	Togo	-261.9
92	Zimbabwe	-264.6
93	Kyrgyzstan	-287.3
94	Paraguay	-300
95	Chad	-324.1
96	Benin	-342.7
97	Guinea	-344
98	Cambodia	-369
99	Mexico	-400.1
100	Uganda	-423
101	Eritrea	-440.5
102	Mozambique	-444.4
103	Fiji	-465.8
104	Panama	-467
105	Madagascar	-504
106	Laos	-404.2
107	Belarus	-511.8
108	Syria	-529
109	Moldova	-561
110	Uruguay	-600
111	Burkina Faso	-604.6
112	Mauritius	-651
113	Albania	-679.9
114	Georgia	-735
115	Tunisia	-760
116	Slovenia	-789.2
117	Nicaragua	-883
118	Senegal	-895.2
119	Thailand	-899.4
120	Tanzania	-906
121	Malta	-966.2
122	Jamaica	-970
123	Cyprus	-1,051
124	El Salvador	-1,059
125	Sri Lanka	-1,118
126	Kenya	-1,119
127	Dominican Republic	-1,124
128	Costa Rica	-1,176
129	Cuba	-1,218
130	Guatemala	-1,533
131	Bosnia and Herzegovina	-1,730
132	Estonia	-1,919
133	Ukraine	-1,933
134	Colombia	-2,219
135	Serbia	-2,451 (2005)
136	Latvia	-2,538
137	Lithuania	-2,572
138	Jordan	-2,834
139	Croatia	-2,892
140	Iceland	-2,932
141	Ethiopia	-3,384
142	Slovakia	-3,781
143	Czech Republic	-4,352
144	Sudan	-4,510
145	Poland	-4,548
146	Bulgaria	-5,100
147	Lebanon	-5,339
148	Pakistan	-5,486
149	New Zealand	-7,944
150	Hungary	-8,392
151	Ireland	-9,450
152	Romania	-12,450
153	South Africa	-12,690
154	Portugal	-16,750
155	Greece	-21,370
156	Italy	-23,730
157	Turkey	-25,990
158	India	-26,400
159	France	-38,000
160	Australia	-41,620
161	United Kingdom	-57,680
162	Spain	-98,600
163	United States	-862,300

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On This Day

October 1: Labour Day in New South Wales, Australian Capital Territory and South Australia (2007); National Day in the People's Republic of China (1949); Independence Day in Cyprus and Nigeria (both 1960), Tuvalu (1978) and Palau (1994).

• 331 BC – Alexander the Great of Macedon defeated Darius III of Persia at the Battle of Gaugamela, and was subsequently crowned "King of Asia" in a ceremony in Arbela.
• 1890 – At the urging of preservationist John Muir, the United States Congress established Yosemite National Park in California.
• 1949 – Chinese Civil War: Chinese Communist Party leader Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China.
• 1964 – Tōkaidō Shinkansen, the first Shinkansen line of high-speed railways in Japan, opened. (0 Series Shinkansen train pictured)

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All Saints Day

The ruins of the Carmo Convent, which was destroyed in the Lisbon earthquake.

The earthquake struck on the morning of 1 November, the Catholic holiday of All Saints' Day. Contemporary reports state that the earthquake lasted between three-and-a-half and six minutes, causing gigantic fissures five metres (16 ft) wide to appear in the city centre. The survivors rushed to the open space of the docks for safety and watched as the water receded, revealing a sea floor littered by lost cargo and old shipwrecks. Approximately forty minutes after the earthquake, an enormous tsunami engulfed the harbour and downtown, rushing up the Tagus river. It was followed by two more waves. In the areas unaffected by the tsunami, fire quickly broke out, and flames raged for five days.

Lisbon was not the only Portuguese city affected by the catastrophe. Throughout the south of the country, in particular the Algarve, destruction was rampant. The shockwaves of the earthquake were felt throughout Europe as far as Finland and North Africa. Tsunamis up to 20 metres (66 ft) in height swept the coast of North Africa, and struck Martinique and Barbados across the Atlantic. A three-metre (ten-foot) tsunami hit the southern English coast. Galway, on the west coast of Ireland, was also hit, resulting in the partial destruction of the "Spanish Arch".

Estimated epicentre of the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.

Of a Lisbon population of 275 000, up to 90 000 were killed. Another 10 000 were killed in Morocco. Eighty-five percent of Lisbon's buildings were destroyed, including famous palaces and libraries, as well as most examples of Portugal's distinctive 16th-century Manueline architecture. Several buildings that had suffered little earthquake damage were destroyed by the subsequent fire. The brand new Opera House, opened only six months before (under the ill-fated name Phoenix Opera), was burned to the ground. The Royal Ribeira Palace, which stood just beside the Tagus river in the modern square of Terreiro do Paço, was destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami. Inside, the 70 000-volume royal library as well as hundreds of works of art, including paintings by Titian, Rubens, and Correggio, were lost. The royal archives disappeared together with detailed historical records of explorations by Vasco da Gama and other early navigators. The earthquake also damaged major churches in Lisbon, namely the Lisbon Cathedral, the Basilicas of São Paulo, Santa Catarina, São Vicente de Fora, and the Misericordia Church. The Royal Hospital of All Saints (the biggest public hospital at the time) in the Rossio square was consumed by fire and hundreds of patients burned to death. The tomb of national hero Nuno Álvares Pereira was also lost. Visitors to Lisbon may still walk the ruins of the Carmo Convent, which were preserved to remind Lisboners of the destruction.

It is said that many animals sensed danger and fled to higher ground before the water arrived. The Lisbon quake is the first documented reporting of such a phenomenon in Europe.

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Social and philosophical implications

Voltaire.

The earthquake shook much more than cities and buildings. Lisbon was the capital of a devout Catholic country, with a history of investments in the church and evangelism in the colonies. Moreover, the catastrophe struck on a Catholic holiday and destroyed almost every important church. For eighteenth-century theology and philosophy, this manifestation of the anger of God was difficult to explain.

The earthquake strongly influenced many thinkers of the European Enlightenment. Many contemporary philosophers mentioned or alluded to the earthquake in their writings, notably Voltaire in Candide and in his Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne ("Poem on the Lisbon disaster"). Voltaire's Candide attacks the notion that all is for the best in this, "the best of all possible worlds", a world closely supervised by a benevolent deity. The Lisbon disaster provided a salutary counterexample. As Theodor Adorno wrote, "[t]he earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of the theodicy of Leibniz" (Negative Dialectics 361). In the later twentieth century, following Adorno, the 1755 earthquake has sometimes been compared to the Holocaust as a catastrophe so tremendous as to have a transformative impact on European culture and philosophy.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was also influenced by the devastation following the earthquake, whose severity he believed was due to too many people living within the close quarters of the city. Rousseau used the earthquake as an argument against cities as part of his desire for a more naturalistic way of life.

Immanuel Kant.

The concept of the sublime, though it existed before 1755, was developed in philosophy and elevated to greater importance by Immanuel Kant, in part as a result of his attempts to comprehend the enormity of the Lisbon quake and tsunami. Kant published three separate texts on the Lisbon earthquake. The young Kant, fascinated with the earthquake, collected all the information available to him in news pamphlets, and used it to formulate a theory of the causes of earthquakes. Kant's theory, which involved the shifting of huge subterranean caverns filled with hot gases, was (though ultimately shown to be false) one of the first systematic modern attempts to explain earthquakes by positing natural, rather than supernatural, causes. According to Walter Benjamin, Kant's slim early book on the earthquake "probably represents the beginnings of scientific geography in Germany. And certainly the beginnings of seismology."

Werner Hamacher has claimed that the earthquake's consequences extended into the vocabulary of philosophy, making the common metaphor of firm "grounding" for philosophers' arguments shaky and uncertain: "Under the impression exerted by the Lisbon earthquake, which touched the European mind in one [of] its more sensitive epochs, the metaphor of ground and tremor completely lost their apparent innocence; they were no longer merely figures of speech" (263). Hamacher claims that the foundational certainty of Descartes' philosophy began to shake following the Lisbon earthquake.

In Portuguese internal politics, the earthquake was devastating. The prime minister was the favorite of the king, but the aristocracy despised him as an upstart son of a country squire. (Although the Prime Minister Sebastião de Melo is known today as Marquis of Pombal, the title was only granted in 1770, fifteen years after the earthquake.) The prime minister in turn disliked the old nobles, whom he considered corrupt and incapable of practical action. Before November 1, 1755 there was a constant struggle for power and royal favour, but afterwards, the competent response of the Marquis of Pombal effectively severed the power of the old aristocratic factions. Silent opposition and resentment of King Joseph I began to rise. This would culminate in an attempted assassination of the king, and the elimination of the powerful Duke of Aveiro and the Távora family.