Austria sees massive expansion in trade deficit in 2017

VIENNA, Feb. 6 (Xinhua) -- Preliminary figures from Statistics Austria on Tuesday showed a significant increase of trade deficit due to widening gap between export and import.

According to the figures, Austria exported 131.08 billion euros (162.4 billion U.S. dollars) in first 11 months of 2017, up 8.6 percent on year.

But the export increase failed to catch up the import growth of 9 percent in the meantime, which led to a total import value of 135.81 billion euros (168.3 billion dollars).

This drove the deficit up to 4.7 billion euros (5.8 billion dollars) in the first 11 months of 2017, a remarkable increase compared with just under 3.9 billion euros (4.8 billion dollars) the same period of the previous year.

The trade deficit with other EU countries fell from 4.99 billion euros (6.18 billion U.S. dollars) over the same period last year, to 4.67 billion euros (5.79 billion U.S. dollars) by the end of November. Enditem