BERLIN: US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew called on Wednesday during a brief stop in Germany for the export powerhouse to spur domestic demand and find the right balance to help drive European and global growth.

“We think policies that promote more domestic investment and demand would be good for the German economy, the global economy,” Lew told reporters after talks with Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble.

Kicking off by expressing US President Barack Obama’s wishes for Chancellor Angela Merkel's speedy recovery after she fractured her pelvis cross-country skiing, Lew said that Washington and Berlin shared the goal of growth and reform.

And he said that “getting the balance right is very important”.

“We’ve made very clear that we think that more domestic demand and investment would be a good thing,” he said, on the middle stop of a three-nation European tour which took in Paris Tuesday and will continue on to Lisbon later Wednesday.

The meeting comes just hours after new trade data showed that German exports are still growing while imports are shrinking and several months after clear differences were exposed between Berlin and its fellow export giant, the United States, over economic policy.

The US Treasury criticised Europe’s biggest economy in its semi-annual report in October for not doing enough to help boost the global economy, saying it needed to tap its surpluses to kick-start domestic demand and singling out its reliance on exports.

Berlin, in turn, tersely rebutted as “not comprehensible” the US report, which criticised the country’s dependence on exports and domestic demand growth as anaemic at a time when Germany could be helping the eurozone pull back from deflation.

Schaeuble, for his part, defended Germany's policy Wednesday, stressing that German growth was driven by domestic demand.

“Within the eurozone we don’t have a German surplus but are just contributing overall to a balanced situation,” he told the joint press conference.

Long the envy of its EU partners for its strong public finances and powerful economy, critics however argue that Germany needs to boost domestic demand and so help its EU partners by spurring export-driven growth in their economies, rather than continue to rely mostly on its own exports for growth.

Data published by the federal statistics office Wednesday showed that the trade surplus expanded in November. —AFP