Containers are stacked on a Maersk Sentosa container ship at the port of Antwerp, Belgium, on July 26, 2018.Francois Lenoir/Reuters
The euro zone’s unadjusted trade surplus jumped year-on-year in July, data showed on Wednesday, as imports fell more amid the economic slowdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic than exports.
The European Union’s statistics office Eurostat said the trade surplus of the 19 countries sharing the euro with the rest of the world was 27.9 billion euros ($33.1 billion) in July, up from 23.2 billion a year earlier. Euro zone imports fell 14.3 per cent in the July compared to a year earlier while exports fell only 10.4 per cent.
Adjusted for seasonal swings the trade surplus in July was 20.3 billion euros, up from 16.0 billion in June as seasonally adjusted exports rose 6.5 per cent month-on-month and imports rose only 4.2 per cent.
The European Union’s trade deficit with China grew in the January-July period to 104.8 billion euros from 92.5 billion in the same period of 2019, but the deficit in trade with Russia, Europe’s main suppliers of oil and gas, fell sharply to 12.4 billion euros from 38.3 billion.
The EU’s trade surplus in the first seven months of the year with the United States declined to 82.7 billion from 89.1 billion and with Britain to 55.7 billion euros from 75.8 billion.
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