Tunisia’s external trade recorded in volume terms (constant price) a drop in exports of around 0.6% and an increase of imports in the order of 4.7% in January 2019, compared to January 2018.
In terms of prices, they rose by 18.4% for imports and 22.7% for exports. During the month of January 2019, Tunisia’s external trade in current values reached 3815.5 MD in exports and 5383.8 MD in imports, i.e. up 21.9% for exports and 24.0% for imports, compared with the same period of 2018.
In January of 2019, exports by volume grew by 19.7% for the mining, phosphates and derivatives sector and by 2.9% for the mechanical and electrical engineering sector compared with the same period of the previous year.
In addition, exports of agriculture and agro-food industries fell in volume by around 23.1%.
Regarding imports, the volume trend is marked by an increase in the agriculture and food industry sector of around 8.3% and the mechanical and electrical industries sector by around 11.1%.
On the other hand, the phosphate mining and derivatives sector registered a decrease of around 31.9%.
At the end of January 2019 alone, the trade deficit, i.e. the difference between exports and imports, already exceeded 1.568 billion DT!
As with inflation, these new external trade figures were developed on the new 2015 base, made after “revising the product sample, updating the weights to ensure better representation of exchanges as well as the improvement of the data control and validation step.
The choice of sample products is based on the criteria of the importance of the product (value), regularity in trade and price stability over time”, the INS said in a statement.
