Turkey’s official statistics agency, TurkStat, has announced that the country’s foreign trade deficit in March dropped 63.7 percent year-on-year, from $5.88 billion to $2.14 billion, the NTV news website reported on Tuesday.
The decline resulted primarily from a significant contraction of 17.8 percent in imports, from $21.44 billion in March 2018 to $17.62 billion in March 2019.
Exports, on the other hand, remained relatively stable, hovering at around $15.5 billion with only a slight decline of 0.4 percent.
Germany was the chief export destination with $1.4 billion, followed by the United Kingdom and Italy.
Russia ranked first among the countries Turkey imported from, with goods and services valued at $1.97 billion. Germany was a close second with $1.61 billion and China third with $1.4 billion.
Seasonally adjusted foreign trade numbers saw an increase over the previous month, 2.5 percent in exports and 2.4 percent in imports.
The manufacturing industry represented 94.9 percent of overall exports, and high tech products accounted for 3.9 percent of industrial exports, while 74.5 percent of imports were manufacturing industry products. High tech products represented 15.7 percent of imported industrial goods.