Turkey’s foreign trade deficit decreases by 10.2 percent, trade volume narrows


Turkey's foreign trade deficit decreased by 10.2 percent in February while foreign trade volume narrowed, the Turkish Statistics Institute (TÜİK) announced on Tuesday. The foreign trade deficit decreased from $5.186 billion to $4.656 billion.Exports and imports had decreased by 6 percent and 7.2 percent respectively compared to the previous year. In February 2015, exports were announced as $12.272 billion and imports were announced as $16.927 billion.Seasonally and calendar-adjusted exports and imports increased by 0.7 percent compared with the previous month. Calendar-adjusted exports decreased by 5.9 percent while imports decreased by 7.2 percent compared with February 2014.In February 2015, exports coverage imports were 72.5 percent, while it was 71.6 percent in February 2014.Exports to the EU-28 decreased by 4.3 percent from $5.428 billion to $5.197 billion, although their share in Turkey's exports increased from 41.6 percent of the previous year to 42.3 percent in February 2015.In February 2015, the main destination of Turkish exports was the U.K. with $1.83 billion, followed by Switzerland with $1.108 billion, Germany with $1 billion and Iraq with $755 million.China stood at the top of the imports list with $2.067 billion, followed by Russia with $1.856 billion, Germany with $1.570 billion and the U.S. with $931 million.The ratio of manufacturing industries products in total exports was 94 percent in February, of which 2.9 percent were high-technology and 29 percent were medium-high technology.The ratio of manufacturing industries products in total imports was 76.1 percent, of which 14.8 percent were high-technology and 44.4 percent were medium-high-technology products.