Namibia's trade deficit narrows in Q1

Namibia's trade deficit narrowed to 4.2 billion Namibia dollars (270 million U.S. dollars)in the first quarter of 2016, representing a contraction of 28.8 percent compared to the same quarter last year.

The country's statistics Agency (NSA), recently released Namibia's trade statistics and attributed the deficit narrow to the fact that export revenue growth exceeded the growth on import expenditure.

"Total exports for Q1 2016 grew by 31.6 percent to 1.1 billion dollars from 870 million dollars recorded a year ago," the agency said.

The NSA attributed this upshot to the improvement in foreign demand for diamonds, copper ores, fish and copper cathodes.

Meanwhile, the agency said that correspondingly, expenditure on imports grew by 12.8 percent to 1.4 billion dollars from 1.2 billion dollars, recorded during the same quarter in 2015.

"This was highly driven by mineral fuels, vehicles, boilers, diamonds, electrical machinery, copper ores, pharmaceuticals and cereal," the agency added.

Despite the deficit reduction, NSA said, the overall trade deficit for 2016 would be much higher than 2.5 billion dollars recorded in 2015, mainly because of the regional drought situation. Enditem