[Excerpt] With international trade at an all-time high, global markets are the new normal for U.S. companies and residents. In 2012, total volume of trade (imports and exports) in the United States was nearly $5 trillion—the largest in the world. U.S. international competitiveness can be assessed by comparing key economic measures across countries. These measures include gross domestic product, unemployment rates, compensation costs, labor productivity rates, and consumer prices. In this Spotlight on Statistics, we compare these and other measures across countries in the Americas, Europe, and Asia and the South Pacific to get a glimpse of how individual economies have performed in recent years and historically.