The national trade balance has been US$1.7 billion in the black since February of this year.
The Ministry of Knowledge Economy announced that “last month, exports fell by 20.6% year-on-year to US$29.1 billion while imports dropped by 32.2% to US$27.4 billion, but the trade balance was still US$1.7billion in the black.
The 20.6% decrement of export was just more improved than last month which was 21.8%. Item by item most items are falling down except LCD devices, but the semiconductor and petrochemistry industries were slowly decrementing. Automobile exports were largely affected by the overall slowdown. In fact, automobiles fell 24.6% in August.
As for regional exports, most regions were decreased more than 20%. On the other hand, exports to the United States and China decreased slowly by 10% year-on-year.
In the case of capital goods, consumer goods and raw materials, we can expect positive signals that help improvement of exports and recovering of the economy because of the slowdown of import decrements.
The average amount of exports recorded the peak point US$1.2 billion, imports recorded the same since November 2008.
Last month’s decrease in exports was caused by temporary factors such as the summer vacation focused on the month of August, a reduction of operation days, and the strike in the automobile industry.
After September we can expect both exports and imports to increase, followed by a regular trade environment.
Consequently the amount of trade surplus can be possibly maintained as a number of two ciphers but the scale is supposed to be decreased in the first half of the year.
