The large domestic demand of the US was met by the rest of the world, especially China and other East Asian economies, which provided goods and services at relatively low costs leading to growing surpluses in these countries. Sustained current account surpluses in some of these EMEs also reflected the lessons learnt from the Asian financial crisis.
Export performance has been unsatisfactory and data up to November 2013 reveal that total domestic exports declined by 2.7 percent. As alluded to earlier, imports continued to surge due to the pick-up in demand across the economy. As a result the trade deficit widened further last year, though this was supported to some extent by favourable inflows of tourism and remittances.