Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 14 • Number 21 • 9th June 2010

WTO Reports Sharp Increase in Trade Flows for 1Q 2010

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The WTO has released its trade statistics for the first quarter of 2010, showing a 27 percent jump in global exports and 24 percent increase in imports from the same period in 2009. Seventy economies were surveyed, representing approximately 90 percent of world trade, according to the WTO.

These figures - released on 2 June - are, for the most part, lower than the trade merchandise figures in the previous quarter, despite this overall increase from one year to the next. However, this quarter-to-quarter drop should be viewed as “a decrease, not really a slowdown,” whose cause could be any of several factors, according to Yann Marcus, a statistical officer at the WTO secretariat.

Part of this decrease, for instance, could be explained by the fact that the WTO does not seasonally adjust its quarterly data for inflation, Marcus said. He also mentioned that it is a bit too early to assess what might have occurred in the second quarter of this year.

Merchandise trade showed a sharp rise during the month of March, after falling off in January and February. While the US and Europe showed 20 percent and 18 percent increases in exports, respectively, they were easily outpaced by Africa and the Middle East, where exports jumped by 53 percent from the same period in 2009, and Russia, which saw a 62 percent increase.

The WTO credited the spikes in exports from Africa, the Middle East and Russia to increased Asian demand and rising commodity prices. According to data from the International Monetary Fund, all primary commodities - including crude petroleum, energy, food and beverages, and metals - showed large price increases, relative to the first quarter last year. These data, however, did not reflect changes in trade volume.

However, the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis does release seasonally adjusted quarterly data on trade volume in their World Trade Monitor publication. Their findings showed that world trade volume increased by 5.3 percent from the fourth quarter of 2009 to the first quarter of 2010, following a previous increase of 6 percent in trade volume from the third quarter to the fourth quarter of 2009 - supporting the WTO’s conclusions that world trade has improved.

The economic recession had severe effects on trade in 2009. Global trade volume that year decreased by 12.2 percent, marking the largest decline since World War II, according to the WTO. However, the WTO’s annual data does not reflect the change in trade value, which, as in the case of the quarterly data discussed here, depends both on changes in commodity prices as well as trade volume.

The WTO states that the totals for Africa and the Middle East are usually underrepresented in these sorts of statistics due to poor data availability.

The WTO also warns that their quarterly and monthly figures will not add up to the annual figures found in their other publications. These figures are unadjusted for inflation, unlike their annual data.

ICTSD reporting.