While acknowledging these surpluses, I intend to leave them out of the rest of my account on the grounds that they are a good deal smaller than in Asia, and that, on past experience, they are likely to be temporary.
For those who want to follow them up, I recommend a recent paper on our website.3 Returning to Asia, we can ask why these countries do not invest more in themselves, and can find several explanations which I will outline later.