United States

01Structure

The United States is a services economy with a large manufacturing sector attached, rather than the other way round. Services account for roughly seventy-eight per cent of output — professional and business services, finance and insurance, healthcare and information technology foremost — against about eleven per cent for manufacturing and one per cent for agriculture.¹ Two consequences follow. Output is driven by domestic demand rather than by anyone else's investment cycle, and the sectors that set the economy's direction are ones whose productivity is hard to measure and harder to forecast.

That composition also makes the American cycle unusually self-contained. Where a German or Korean downturn typically arrives through export orders, an American one usually starts at home — in housing, in credit conditions, or in the labour market — which is why the measures in the panel above track each other more closely here than in more open economies.

02Trade and exposure

For an economy of its size the United States trades relatively little: exports are a far smaller share of output than in any European economy carried on this site. The absolute numbers are nonetheless the largest in the world — around $3.4 trillion of exports against $4.3 trillion of imports in 2025.²

The composition matters more than the totals. A goods deficit running near $1.27 trillion sits alongside a services surplus of some $336 billion,² which is the trade account restating the structure in section 01: the country buys manufactures and sells software, finance, education and intellectual property. Tariff policy operates almost entirely on the first of those and barely touches the second.

03Energy and resources

The United States is the rare large economy that is a net energy exporter, and the change is recent enough that most of the intuitions built around the oil shocks no longer apply to it. Shale turned a structural importer into an exporter within about fifteen years.

Liquefied natural gas is now the clearest expression of that. Exports average more than sixteen billion cubic feet a day in 2026, an industry worth some $44 billion built almost entirely within a decade, with export capacity projected to reach 27.7 billion cubic feet a day by 2030.³ The macroeconomic effect is a sign change: a rise in global energy prices is, on net, a transfer toward the United States rather than away from it — the opposite of the position described on the German, Italian and Japanese pages.

04Labour and demography

Labour force participation stood at 61.6 per cent in August 2026 and has been falling. Most of the recent decline is not workers giving up: more than half of it came from a statistical correction to the population level in January and from the steady arithmetic of an ageing population.⁴ That distinction matters for reading the unemployment rate in the panel above, since a shrinking denominator flatters it.

Immigration has historically been what kept the American labour force growing where other advanced economies' shrank, and that channel narrowed sharply in 2026: consulates issued twenty-six per cent fewer non-immigrant visas in February 2026 than a year earlier, and seventy-four per cent fewer H-1B visas for specialty occupations.⁴ Whether this is cyclical or structural is the open question under every American labour supply forecast.

05Public finances

The United States is the only large economy here with no binding fiscal rule — no constitutional debt limit as in Germany, no treaty reference value as in the euro area. The statutory debt ceiling is a limit on issuing debt already authorised by spending, not a limit on the deficit, which is why it produces recurring standoffs rather than fiscal restraint.

The Congressional Budget Office puts the fiscal 2026 deficit at about $1.9 trillion and projects it to grow to $3.1 trillion by 2036; federal debt reached $31.7 trillion at the end of June 2026, $2.7 trillion more than a year earlier.⁵ The debt figure in the panel above uses the OECD's public sector debt definition and is therefore not directly comparable with either the American headline number or with the Maastricht ratios on the European pages.

06Money and prices

The Federal Reserve has a dual mandate, set by statute in 1977: maximum employment and stable prices, with moderate long-term interest rates alongside.⁶ That is a materially different remit from the European Central Bank's, whose primary objective is price stability alone — and it means the policy rate in the panel above is being set against two targets that can, and at present do, pull in opposite directions.

The dollar's reserve status is the other structural fact about American monetary conditions. It accounted for about fifty-seven per cent of allocated global reserves in the first quarter of 2026,⁷ which lets the United States borrow in its own currency at scale and transmits its monetary policy to everyone else's financial conditions — including those of every other country on this site.

07What the models expect

These are computed on this site from each series' own history, and are nobody's official projection. The bar is the range the figure lands in half the time; the dot is the central path.

Replayed from past origins on today's revised figures, the same baseline was usually off by 0.52 on consumer price inflation, 1.27 on real gdp, 0.17 on unemployment rate, 0.39 on central bank policy rate, 5.11 on government debt.

08Structural indicators

The figures behind the sections above. They move by a point or two a year, so each carries the year it was measured.

09Sources and method

Live figures: OECD, Bank for International Settlements, OECD via DBnomics. Each is fetched nightly and validated before publication; the delivery report on /status/ says how old every one of them is. Profile written 2026-09-10, next review September 2027.

1. Sectoral composition of output — US Economy: Structure, Strengths and Vulnerabilities
2. Trade totals, the goods deficit and the services surplus — FocusEconomics, United States
3. LNG export volumes, industry size and planned capacity — S&P Global, July 2026; US Department of Energy
4. Participation rate, the sources of its decline, and visa issuance — St. Louis Fed, August 2026; Niskanen Center, immigration data
5. Deficit and debt — Congressional Budget Office, 2026–2036 outlook; American Action Forum, June 2026
6. The statutory dual mandate — Congressional Research Service
7. Dollar share of allocated reserves — St. Louis Fed, February 2026