In order to maintain the competitiveness of their exports, the Asian countries intervene on the FX market, thus preventing appreciation of their currencies. They invest the purchased dollars in American bonds, thus financing the US current account deficit. Another hypothesis that explains the mechanism of the occurrence of global imbalances has been formed by the present Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke 9 . His major concept is that the large US current account deficit cannot be explained solely by internal factors. In the opinion of the present Fed chairman, external factors, which he has defined as a global savings glut, have played the key role. The hypothesis says that a substantial surplus of savings over investments in the Asian countries, together with the structurally high savings in Germany and Japan, have resulted in a global savings glut that has caused a boom on the US stock exchanges and an increase in the property prices, which has in turn resulted in a drop in household savings in the USA. The Bretton Woods 2 and the global savings glut hypotheses are challenged by the IMF, which claims that the source of the current account surpluses is the excessively low level of investments in the Asian countries - except for China.
There are still regulation barriers to business activity in Europe, which make it impossible to move freely across country borders 30 . New information transfer technologies create a possibility of central processing of information, which is why limiting of the capability to take advantage of this process results in lower economies of scale. Moreover, the development of road transport still faces regulatory barriers. Finally, cultural differences, which are a natural barrier in business activity, should be mentioned. While indicating the vital role of services in building a competitive edge of the American economy, we should also relate to EU solutions in the form of the so-called Services Directive, which has been recently adopted by the European Parliament. The basic objective of the directive, in its version proposed by the European Commission, is to create a single market for services covering the whole of the European Union and to abolish all the barriers that prevent or significantly hinder rendering services by entrepreneurs of a given country in other EU countries. However, the amendments introduced by the Parliament, which deleted the so-called “country of origin” clause, in principle allow maintaining the existing barriers, which will result in a more difficult and hampered process of increasing the effectiveness of the European companies, including their capability of taking advantage of offshoring. This is why, in the era of globalisation, all initiatives that increase the region’s investment attractiveness play a vital role.