Like Germany, for instance. Home of a huge range of quality imports - who hasn’t heard of German craftsmanship before? - Germany gives a great deal more to the United States than it receives in any given year. Such is the state of things so far in 2008: after six months the balance is skewed fairly widely in Germany’s favor, with some $22 million extra in their pockets.

And if past years are to be any indication that number will probably reach as high as $40 million. The balance of trade has been climbing, aside from the occasional dip, steadily for quite a few years, and there’s no reason to think it will slow down now.

But it looks these days like Japan’s winning a new war, and this one on an economic front. The Japanese Balance of Trade with the United States is way out of whack for the Americans. Japanese exporters make a lot more than Americans do in any given year, and millions more worth of Japanese products enter the U.S. than the other way around.

As a result the Balance of Trade for the United States in regards to japan is always well into the negatives, and the size of that negative seems to grow every year. And here’s the proof.

The 15 nations that comprise the European Union (those countries that share the euro, anyway) fell into a trade deficit in May 2008, according to Industry Week Magazine. The deficit was at a total of 4.6 billion euros, dropping from an April deficit of a lower 2.5 billion euros. The total deficit is up over 3 billion euros from the same time last year.

The total European Union (made up of 27 countries) had a total trade deficit of 21.5 billion euros in the same month, 7 billion more than the same month from 2007.

Original story courtesy Industry Week.

But what about places like the United States? Nobody’s tried very hard to get the Americans out of the red and back into the blue. If anything imports to the United States are increasing every year.

Unfortunately, that’s just the way it has to be. For one country to have a favorable Balance of Trade there must be another stuck in a deficit. There’s no way to appease every country all the time. Each country is in the game looking out for its’ own interests, and so long as that’s true there will always be a few nations with way too many imports and not nearly enough exports. And it takes a long, hard crawl to get out of that rut.

It’s actually quite simple, so long as you understand what two terms mean. The balance of trade is the cash value of exports versus the cash value of imports for a given country. If a country is exporting more goods than it is importing then its’ balance of trade is in a surplus. If the opposite is true then the country has a trade deficit. Generally speaking it’s far more beneficial for a country to be in a surplus than a deficit.

So what’s the US balance of trade? Sadly, it’s a deficit. Since at least the 1970’s the United States has had a trade deficit that has only deepened over the decades. This applies, however, only to the trade of goods; trade of services has been in the plus for ages.

Good news for China, bad news for the United States: Chinese exports to the United States have outweighed U.S. exports almost five to one in the last few years. Admittedly these numbers have come down in recent years, but China still has American at a severe disadvantage, and the last three months worth of numbers isn’t changing that much.

China’s definitely on the rise, and in one of the richest countries in the world to boot. And given the country’s trend towards commercialization and expansion of industry in the last decade, they’re bound to get better and better. Good for them.

The Theory: With increased trade to the United States, new markets for American consumer goods would open up in Mexico creating more, higher paying U.S. jobs. Higher standards of living would result from the increased trade for all three countries involved.

The Reality: The basic provisions of NAFTA allow investors to move factories and jobs to other countries where environmental and labor laws are less strict so as to increase their profits. Hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers have lost their livelihoods due to the relocation of their jobs to foreign markets.

NO END IN SIGHT: In 2005 Congress approved the addition of five Central American countries into NAFTA and the Bush administration is currently developing legislation that will expand NAFTA to include over 25 more countries in Central and South America.