It is always a risky enterprise to attempt to project « stylized facts » on to any complex actual economic situation; just when one feels that a recognisable pattern has clearly emerged the situation will change and invalidate ones hoped for empirical regularity. Yet, having said this, it appears that it is possible over the period since the second world war to broadly distinguish between groups of nations on the basis of their balance of payments behaviour. First, there are what have been called the strong currency countries like Germany and Switzerland. These countries tend to run habitual balance of trade surpluses, their economic policies are never constrained by the necessity of avoiding trade account deficits and their most characteristic trading problem has been the existence of occasionally massive capital inflows. Second, there are a larger group of what might be called normal countries like Belgium and Sweden. In the recent difficult times the performance of these countries has deteriorated slightly, but broadly, over the past thirty-five years they have managed to achieve rough long-run trade balance equilibrium without suffering excessive unemployment or unduly restricting the growth rate of their economies.