EU-Russia trade: from deficit to 0.2B euro surplus
European Union trade with Russia has been strongly affected following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with the EU imposing import and export restrictions on several products, EU statistics agency Eurostat said on May 31.
Considering seasonally adjusted values, both exports and imports dropped below the levels prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Russia’s share in EU’s extra-EU exports fell from four per cent in February 2022 to 1.8 per cent in March 2023. Over the same period, the share of extra-EU imports from Russia fell from 9.5 per cent to 1.9 per cent.
The EU’s trade deficit with Russia, which peaked at 18.2 billion euro in March 2022, decreased to six billion euro in December 2022 and turned into a small surplus in March 2023 at 0.2 billion euro.
The value of imports from Russia fell from 22 billion euro in March 2022 to 3.8 billion euro in March 2023, and, in the same period, the value of exports slightly increased from 3.6 billion euro to four billion euro. However, it should be noted that in February 2022 exports had been as high as eight billion euro, Eurostat said.
The EU’s total trade balance with Russia is strongly correlated with the balance for energy products, the statistics agency said.
Soaring prices for energy products in 2021 and 2022 caused a considerable trade deficit.
However, import restrictions and falling prices reduced the trade deficit, which was 5.6 billion euro in the first quarter of 2023.
In the first quarter of 2023, the EU-Russia trade balance for energy registered a deficit of 11.3 billion euro, indicating a substantial difference from the deficit observed in the first quarter of 2022 at 43.9 billion euro.
Since the first quarter of 2022, the trade balance for chemicals increased by 1.1 billion euro to 3.7 billion euro, Eurostat said.
(Photo: Ken Munyard/freeimages.com)
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