Foreign Trade

Istat presents data on Italy’s foreign trade as well as unit value and volume indices (base year 2005=100) referring to January 2012. The results of the flash estimates on extra-EU trade for January 2012 has been disseminated on February 23^th .

• In January 2012 seasonally-adjusted data, compared to December 2011, showed a decrease of 2.5% for export and a of 0.5% for imports. The decrease, for exports, was of equal intensity for EU and non EU countries. As regards imports the decrease was recorded for EU countries only (-5,1%) compared to the growth of non EU markets (+5,1%). Over the last three months, seasonally-adjusted data, in comparison with the previous three months, showed an increase of 1.6% for outgoing flows and a drop of 2.8% for incoming flows.

• In January 2012, compared with the same month of the previous year, trade rose by 4.3% for exports (+3.9% for EU area and +4.8% for non EU countries) and dropped by 2.6% for imports (-5.4% for EU and +0.2% for non EU countries).  The trade balance amounted to -4.4 billion Euro (table 1) compared with -6,5 billion Euro registered in the same month of 2010.