China exports like a trillion dollars of value more than it imports, and it seems to actively maintain this stance - Does it? And if so, why? My reductive ape-brain says if more goods are leaving your country than coming in, then other countries are accumulating actual goods, and your country is accumulating pieces of paper (or digital bits). Seems like a losing strategy.
Why not just make all the goods that your country wants (especially if you’re an enormous country that can scale economies and has access to strategic materials like China) and then you’d have more stuff?
And how do currency exchange markets fit in? I thought exporting and importing and fluctuating value of currencies meant that it should all sort of ‘balance out’ in the end. Because prices of currencies change the value of export/import and consequently you’d eventually have a country that exports and imports the same value of goods.
Maybe I fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of trade. Or maybe I’ve been playing too much Victoria 3.
love to micromanage vicky3 to the point of checking each building type’s employment saturation and the volume of input/output commodities to maximize employment
if i wanted stress-free fun id play bugsnax. i need to make every country i play a communist manufacturing powerhouse with an incredible standard of living
I do that without all that effort all you gotta do is just build shit also it helps if you join the British or French market if you’re a small country to get immigrants (but then you gotta get independence later)
