The invisible balance or balance of trade on services is that part of the balance of trade that refers to services and other products that do not result in the transfer of physical objects. Examples include consulting services, shipping services, tourism, and patent license revenues. This figure is usually generated by tertiary industry. The term 'invisible balance' is especially common in the United Kingdom.
For countries that rely on service exports or on tourism, the invisible balance is particularly important. For instance the United Kingdom and Saudi Arabia receive significant international income from financial services, while Japan and Germany rely more on exports of manufactured goods.
Read more about Invisible Balance: Types of Invisibles, Balance of Payments and Invisibles, Balance of Payments Problems and The Invisible Balance
Famous quotes containing the words invisible and/or balance:
“They threw off their clothes, and he gathered her to him, and found her, found the pure lambent reality of her for ever invisible flesh. Quenched, inhuman, his fingers upon her unrevealed nudity were the fingers of silence upon silence, the body of mysterious night upon the body of mysterious night, the night masculine and feminine, never to be seen with the eye, or known with the mind, only known as a palpable revelation of living otherness.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Upon looking back from the end of the last chapter and surveying the texture of what has been wrote, it is necessary, that upon this page and the five following, a good quantity of heterogeneous matter be inserted, to keep up that just balance betwixt wisdom and folly, without which a book would not hold together a single year.”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)