(MENAFN- AFP) Germany's trade surplus, a source of tension with European neighbours, is not harmful to the economy, but helpful, a top official of the German central bank or Bundesbank said on Friday.
"Germany has been criticised for its relatively high current account surpluses," Bundesbank executive board member Andreas Dombret told a banking congress.
"The current account balance in Germany is, however, not the result of distinct government policies or even central economic planning. It is, first and foremost, the result of market-driven processes reflecting the investment and saving decisions of millions of market participants," Dombret said.
Germany's surpluses simply reflected structural causes, the central banker said.
"For countries like Germany, a current account surplus helps to absorb future burdens induced by its demographic development. In this sense, current account surpluses are not an economic harm but an economic asset," Dombret said.
Europe's top economy has come under increasing fire recently for its ballooning trade surplus, which critics claims is putting the brakes on economic recovery in Germany's crisis-stricken neighbours.
Last month, the US Treasury riled Germany by saying that it needed to tap its surpluses to boost demand and help the eurozone pull back from deflation.
Similar sentiments were subsequently expressed by the EU Commission, which announced it would was putting the German surplus under scrutiny.
The critics argue that Germany needs to boost domestic demand and so help its EU partners rather than continue to rely mostly on exports for growth.
Long the envy of its European Union partners for its strong public finances and powerful economy, Germany runs a huge trade surplus as one of the world's top exporters with China and the United States.
But Berlin's response has been tetchy, dismissing the criticism as "incomprehensible," arguing that the high surplus reflected the competitiveness of German firms.
A day earlier, European Central Bank president Mario Draghi also came to Germany's defence.
"You cannot make the weak stronger by making the strong weaker," Draghi told business leaders in Berlin.
"Similarly, the answer to the problems of the euro area is not to weaken its stronger economies. Rather, it is to strengthen its weaker economies," Draghi said.
In September, Germany's trade surplus hit a record high level of 18.9 billion euros ($25.5 billion) in seasonally adjusted terms, data from the federal statistics office Destatis showed.
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