Denmark Has the EU's Biggest Surplus With the World, at 12.3% of GDP

The annual flow behind the accumulated stock

The current account records what a country earns from the rest of the world against what it pays out: trade in goods and services, income on investments, and transfers. A surplus means money coming in on net; a deficit means the reverse.

Where the net international investment position is the accumulated stock, this is the annual flow that builds it. A country running persistent surpluses becomes a creditor; one running persistent deficits becomes a debtor.

In 2025, sixteen Member States ran surpluses and eleven ran deficits.

The surpluses

Denmark records 12.3% of GDP, the largest in the Union and double the Commission's 6% threshold.

Ireland follows at 8.0%, the Netherlands at 7.6%, Malta at 6.7% and Sweden at 6.5%. With Denmark those are the five Member States above the Commission's threshold; the next largest surpluses, Germany at 4.4% and Slovenia at 4.1%, sit inside the band. Denmark's surplus is consistent with its creditor position of 97.8% of GDP: the flow and the stock tell the same story about the same economy.

A large surplus is treated as an imbalance in the Commission's framework, which is counterintuitive if a surplus is read as success. The reasoning is that a country running a persistent large surplus is consuming and investing less than it produces, which suppresses demand for its trading partners and, within a currency union, cannot be corrected by an exchange rate movement.

The deficits

Cyprus records -8.8%, the largest deficit in the Union, followed by Romania at -7.5%, Bulgaria at -6.1% and Greece at -5.6%.

Romania's position is the one that has changed most over the years. It combines a persistent trade deficit with strong domestic demand, and the deficit has been financed rather than corrected. Its net investment position has deteriorated accordingly.

Greece's deficit sits on top of the Union's most negative investment position, which is the combination the imbalance procedure is designed to detect: a stock already deeply negative and a flow still adding to it.

What the framework is for

The macroeconomic imbalance procedure was created after the euro crisis, when it became clear that current account divergence inside a currency union had gone unmonitored while fiscal deficits were watched closely. Several countries that entered the crisis worst placed had complied with the fiscal rules and run current account deficits of 10% of GDP or more for years.

The asymmetric thresholds — surpluses tolerated to 6%, deficits only to -4% — reflect a judgement that deficits are the more immediate risk, since a deficit country depends on continued willingness to lend and a surplus country does not.

Whether that asymmetry is correct has been argued since it was set. The data here does not settle it, and this study does not attempt to.

Where the two ends meet

Neither end of this ranking is close to balance. Denmark at +12.3% and Cyprus at -8.8% are twenty-one points of GDP apart, inside a single market that in 2025 shared a single currency among twenty of its members — twenty-one from January 2026, when Bulgaria, which records one of the widest deficits here, adopted the euro.