WASHINGTON — Closing the books on a fiscal year in which the federal budget deficit fell more sharply than in any year since the end of World War II, the Treasury Department reported on Thursday that the deficit for 2013 dropped to $680 billion, from about $1.1 trillion the previous year.

In nominal terms, that is the smallest deficit since 2008, and signals the end of a five-year stretch beginning with the onset of the recession when the country’s fiscal gap came in at more than $1 trillion each year. As a share of the nation’s economy, the budget deficit fell to about 4.1 percent, from a high of more than 10 percent during the depths of the Great Recession.

The report comes days before the White House is scheduled to release a new budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1 that avoids cuts in spending and focuses on ways to help spur the still-tepid recovery through additional government investment.

Republicans, insisting that the budget deficit remains too large, have long said that President Obama has proved a poor steward of the economy, overseeing a period of sluggish growth and rising debt.