Netherlands fact of the day

The Dutch are still consuming about 5 per cent less, on average, than they were almost a decade ago.

Furthermore:

Yet the employment rate for Dutch 25-54-year-olds, a reasonable measure of the economy’s underlying vigour, is still about 5 percentage points below the pre-crisis peak.

Here is a possible surprise in this context:

It has the biggest current account surplus, as a share of output, in the entire euro area, making Germany look almost Anglo-Saxon by comparison.

Much of the remainder of the Matthew C. Klein Alphaville post builds an interesting comparison between the Netherlands and Belgium, recommended.  Part of the problem may be the Dutch housing market and tough bankruptcy law.