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Now let's talk about a U.S. trade partner that's been criticized by President Trump. The president complains about German products sold in the United States much as he complains about China. Germany's exports do make almost half of the country's economic output compared with just 12 percent for the United States. So how does Germany pull that off? NPR's John Ydstie concludes a series.
JOHN YDSTIE, BYLINE: The shipping area at Beko Technologies is a busy place. Boxes filled with filters, condensate drains and monitoring devices for compressed air systems are headed all over the world.
Where is this going?
RAINER STUTZEL: Italy, Italy.
YDSTIE: Italy.
Rainer Stutzel, a marketing executive at Beko, is giving us a look around the company's main location in Neuss, Germany, across the Rhine River from Dusseldorf.
STUTZEL: Here we have the area where our compressed air filters are being produced.
YDSTIE: Stutzel says compressed air is used everywhere in the global economy from gas stations to paint shops to hospitals. In the early 1980s, Beko's founder developed a condensate drain that removed corrosive moisture from compressed air systems. The company, which now has about 500 employees, later developed filters and other products that eliminate impurities from compressed air.
STUTZEL: Actually, if you think, OK, you leave the condensate inside a compressed air system and the compressed air goes to a paint job place, like painting cars with spray guns, not only would the paint come out of the spray gun, but lots of drops of oil and water and dirt. And your car would look like hell.
YDSTIE: That's why the world wants Beko's products. And the company provides them through four factories and several marketing subsidiaries spread across the globe. The result - half of Beko's production ends up outside Germany. Thousands of small and mid-sized German companies, like Beko technologies, are big exporters. They've helped create a $280 billion annual surplus in the export of goods for Germany. Meanwhile, the U.S. has a $750 billion deficit.
Martin Baily, an economist at the Brookings Institution, says it's partly because Germany decided after World War II to rebuild its economy through manufacturing and exports. Also, says Baily, German firms are more motivated to export than U.S. firms.
MARTIN BAILY: Partly because it is a smaller economy. So their companies are much more oriented towards exporting, whereas, our companies are much more oriented towards selling in the domestic market.
YDSTIE: The big U.S. domestic market is an advantage in many ways, says Baily.
BAILY: But from a trade point of view, it means that most companies are sort of, like, oh, yeah, exports. Why would we export?
YDSTIE: German exporters have also benefited from China's rapid growth, says economist Jeromin Zettelmeyer of the Peterson Institute for International Economics.
JEROMIN ZETTELMEYER: Germany is lucky that it has the type of industrial structure that produces goods that China needs.
YDSTIE: Like high-quality machines for China's factories. So, in part, German companies have simply out competed companies from other countries. But what about the Trump administration's claim that Germany is cheating at trade?
ZETTELMEYER: Yes, it's not cheating (laughter).
YDSTIE: Zettelmeyer, who is also a former economic official in the German government, says the Trump administration does have a point about one advantage Germany has.
ZETTELMEYER: You know, the only sense in which I think Germany could be accused of cheating - in quotation marks - is by being a member of the euro.
YDSTIE: The euro has been Germany's currency since 1999. But if Germany still had the deutsche mark, its products would almost certainly be more expensive and less competitive in global markets. That's because the deutsche mark would reflect the real strength of the German economy. The euro doesn't. It reflects the less robust economy of the whole euro area, and therefore, German products priced in euros are less expensive and more competitive.
There is another force that supports Germany's big trade surplus. Germany saves more than the U.S., both at the personal and government level. The German government balances its federal budget or runs a surplus, while the U.S. government runs huge budget deficits. In other words, the U.S. borrows massively instead of saving like the Germans do, says Martin Baily.
BAILY: They are very disciplined on that, so they don't run those deficits. Their saving is high so they get the conditions right under which they can have a trade surplus.
YDSTIE: The U.S. has urged Germany to spend more on its infrastructure and other programs which could draw more imports into Germany and reduce its surplus. But many Germans are proud that what they produce is in demand around the world, and they're not inclined to save less or spend more to mollify their critics. John Ydstie, NPR News.
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