In 2012, the US exported $1.55 trillion worth of goods, but it also imported $2.28 trillion worth of goods. Simple math shows that that results in a large deficit: approximately $730 billion. In this post, I’ve mapped the balance of trade in goods for the US with each country in 2012. As you can see, there are both surpluses and deficits. Interestingly, taking the median of all the countries’ balances yields a value of $0.004 billion; if this were a normally distributed dataset with no outliers, the surpluses would just about cancel out the deficits…but it isn’t.

The deficit with China ($315.1 billion) alone is more than 150% of all the surpluses combined, and accounts for over 43% of the net global deficit. On the map, I’ve labeled the top five deficits and surpluses. After China, the top deficits are Japan ($76.4 billion), Mexico ($61.6 billion), Germany ($59.9 billion), and Saudi Arabia ($37.7 billion). The top surpluses are Hong Kong ($32.0 billion), Australia ($21.7 billion), United Arab Emirates ($20.3 billion), Netherlands ($18.4 billion), and Belgium ($12.1 billion). Keep in mind these are total deficits and surpluses due to trade in goods only (not services) for the calendar year 2012. They are not cumulative based on previous years of trade!

Data source: http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/index.html