SLOVAKIA continued to report a positive foreign trade balance in November 2013, the latest month for which full statistics are available. Exports amounted to €6.09 billion while imports were at €5.78 billion, leaving the trade balance at plus €314 million.
Over the first 11 months of 2013, compared with the same period of 2012, total exports increased by 3.4 percent to €59.8 billion and total imports by 1.5 percent to €55.2 billion. The trade balance was in a surplus of €4.6 billion, the Slovak Statistics Office announced January 9.
Analysts of the National Bank of Slovakia see large companies behind the year-on-year increase in exports.
“Large producers in the whole spectrum of production activities contributed to this, especially producers of motor vehicles, electrical appliances, chemicals, plastic, refined crude oil products as well as processors of metals,” the monetary department of the central bank wrote in its commentary, as cited by the SITA newswire.
In a shift after the economic crisis, Slovakia has swung into foreign trade surplus in recent years. Over the last three years Slovakia’s foreign trade ended in a monthly trade deficit only exceptionally and it has been reporting cumulative annual trade surpluses since 2009. In 2011 the trade surplus amounted to roughly €1 billion while it was almost €3.6 billion in 2012.
