The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce, announced today that total April exports of $129.5 billion and imports of $188.0 billion resulted in a goods and services deficit of $58.5 billion, $3.9 billion less than the $62.4 billion in March, revised. April exports were $0.2 billion more than March exports of $129.2 billion. April imports were $3.6 billion less than March imports of $191.6 billion.
In April, the goods deficit decreased $3.7 billion from March to $67.1 billion, and the services surplus increased $0.2 billion to $8.6 billion. Exports of goods were virtually unchanged at $91.1 billion, and imports of goods decreased $3.6 billion to $158.2 billion. Exports of services increased $0.2 billion to $38.4 billion, and imports of services were virtually unchanged at $29.8 billion.
In April, the goods and services deficit was down $3.8 billion from April 2006. Exports were up $12.8 billion, or 10.9 percent, and imports were up $8.9 billion, or 5.0 percent.
The cumulative year to date trade deficit total for 2007 is 6.6% less than the year to date totals in 2006.
A few points.
Since January 2005, exports have increased 26.68% while imports have increased 19%. At this pace, it will take a long time for exports to catch-up to imports. This means it's pretty doubtful we can simply export our way out of the trade deficit.
Here's a chart of the difference between imports and exports going back to January 2005. Notice there really isn't a meaningful difference between the numbers for the past 2.5 years.
1 comment:
This is not (maybe, yet?) the good news on the exports front that we are looking for ... almost all of the change is declining imports, which could simply be seasonal swings (the early Easter meaning slower April unloading) or consumer goods slowdown from gasoline price squeezes.
The larger share of the gasoline price increase is an increase in the margin over the cost of crude oil, mostly because of supply chain bottlenecks ... so belt tightening on imported products to buy gasoline would, in this case, show up as a drop in the import bill. Also, the slowdown in residential construction will have led to slowdowns in timber imports from Canada.
This is another one of those frustrating "flip of the coin" situations, because one serious crisis in the Middle East and Brent crude oil prices hitting $80/barrel wipes out that very slight gain in net exports.
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