surge in Italian trade. According to the numbers released this morning by Istat, between October and November exports grew by 3,5% and imports by 1,4%. On an annual basis, exports rose by 6,4% in November and imports by 3,8%. The trade balance surplus thus settled at 4,4 billion (against 3,4 billion in November 2014), bringing the total for the first 11 months of 2015 at 39,171 billion (they were 36,2 billion in the same period of the previous year).
Again between January and November 2015, exports recorded a trend increase of 3,8% in value and 2% in volume. The growth of imports is 3,3% in value, but is much larger in volume (+7%), mainly due to the fall in the prices of energy products (-26,4%). From the beginning, net of energy, the surplus would be +70,2 billion.
Istat also specifies that the cyclical increase in exports in November was driven by both trade areas: +3,7% for non-EU countries and +3,4% for EU countries. Even the more contained growth in imports reflects an increase in purchases from the EU area (+1,7%) and from the non-EU area (+1,1%).
The year-on-year expansion is particularly marked for exports to Germany (+8,4%) and the France (+9,1%), but, outside Europe, the improvement is even more positive towards Japan (+ 21,4%) and Use (+13,2%). On the other hand, there was a large decline towards the OPEC countries (-10,5%).
For the individual sectors, the sales of motor vehicles (+21,6%), pharmaceutical, chemical-medicinal and botanical items (+12,1%) and computers, electronic and optical devices (+11,9%) grew significantly. Sales of machinery and equipment to Germany, Opec and the USA and of motor vehicles to the United Kingdom contribute almost one percentage point to the trend growth in exports.
The tendential increase in imports, on the other hand, is the synthesis of the growth in purchases from EU countries (+7,7%) and the decrease from non-EU countries (-1,8%). There was strong growth in purchases from Turkey (+19%) and Poland (+17,1%) and the import of pharmaceutical, chemical-medicinal and botanical items (+31,1%).
