Tunisia’s trade deficit reached 1.095 billion dinars at the end of January, compared with 1.432 billion dinars a year earlier, narrowing by 793 million dinars or 24% compared with January 2022. As a result, the coverage rate increased by 7.7 percentage points to 82.2%.
This deficit is largely explained by the deficit recorded with certain countries, such as China (-586.8 million dinars), Turkey (-247.6 million), Algeria (-215.3 million) and Russia (-190.3 million dinars).
On the other hand, the balance of trade in goods recorded a surplus with other countries, mainly France (494.9 million dinars), Germany (326.3 million), Italy (119.8 million) and Libya (182.6 million dinars).
Excluding energy, the trade deficit dropped to 455.8 million dinars. In fact, the energy deficit amounts to 639.6 million dinars (58% of the total deficit) compared to 702.2 million dinars in January 2022.
According to data published by the National Institute of Statistics (INS), exports grew by 21% to 5.044 billion dinars, compared to 4.168 billion dinars at the end of January 2022.
As for imports, they posted a rise of 9.6% to 6.1 billion dinars, compared to 5.6 billion in January last year. This increase in imports is due to the increase in imports of raw materials and semi-finished goods (+14.3%), capital goods (+14.7%) and consumer goods (+5.4%). On the other hand, imports of energy products fell by 7.8%.
As for the increase in exports observed in January 2023, it concerns several sectors: exports of food products rose by 16.6%, those of textiles, clothing and leather by 23.8% and those of machinery and electrical equipment by 35.7%. On the other hand, exports in the energy sector fell by 6% and those in the mining, phosphate and derivative industries by 20.1%.
