Foreign trade

Istat presents data on Italy’s foreign trade as well as unit value and volume indices (base year 2005=100) referring to April 2011. The results of the flash estimates on extra-EU trade for April 2011 has been disseminated on May 20th.

In April 2011 seasonally-adjusted data, compared to March 2011, presented an increase of 0.8% both for export or imports. The growth is more relevant in extra-EU flows: +2.8 for outgoing flows and +2.4% for incoming flows. A slight drop in export (-0.6%) and import (-0.5%) is recorded on EU markets. Over the last three months, seasonally-adjusted data, in comparison with the previous three months, showed a higher increase for incoming flows (+4.9%) than outgoing flows (+3.1%).

• In April 2011, compared with the same month of the previous year, trade raised by 12.9% for exports: 17.7% for non EU countries and 9.4% for EU area and by 20.7% (+30% for non EU and +13.4% for EU countries) for imports. The trade balance amounts to -3.8 billion Euro (table 1) compared with -1.3 billion Euro registered in the same month of 2010.

• In the first four months of 2011, compared with the same period of the previous year, trade increased by 16.9% for exports (+21.6% for non EU countries and +13.8% for EU area) and by 22.5% (+31% for non EU and +15.8% for EU countries) for imports. The trade balance showed a deficit of 17.9 billion Euro (table 1). It was 9.9 in the first period of 2010.

For further details, please see CONISTAT

According to the SDDS programme of the IMF, Istat publishes data of this press release on the National Summary Data Page and disseminates an annual calendar of press releases both on Istat and SDDS website.