The mid year review of Foreign Trade Performance of India

India's financial year is counted from April to March. That makes it out of step from regular calendar year followed at most places. The September numbers for foreign trade is here. So that makes it a half year data being available for this financial year. The brief summary from the official report is as follows:

India's foreign trade summary - April to Sept 2018

Imports over the period has grown faster than exports of merchandise and services. To that extent, the trade deficit worsens. What is noticeable is that even in services, the trend is following merchandise in terms of imports growing faster. India maintains an overall services surplus of around 70 Billion USD per annum that helps bridge the merchandise trade deficit of around 200 Billion USD (other gap-filling coming through various forms of capital flows).

Since 2013, when the exports last grew significantly, we are stuck in doldrums in the range of around 300 Billion USD exports. The government has exhausted all traditionally available means of cajoling exports to grow. The exports has simply not grown. Also, the constituents of exports have also not changed significantly. As I predicted, the weakening of rupee has not made exports grow; it takes more than a year before weak currency effects starts to show on actual trade.

I have a feeling that we squandered away the recent good three years of global export growth wave when many countries saw their export boats getting a lift. Demonetization and lack of sensitivity towards exports while launching GST were two contributing factors, apart from credit squeeze in Indian market.

Meanwhile, we are approaching headwinds in exports, or rather, international trade and growth in general due to:

• Trade appetite wane in general, trade wars, losing significance of WTO and its appellate mechanism
• Out of sync monetary policies in US (tight) and other countries (loose) leading to dollar appreciation and its spillover effects which will wash ashore everywhere in next 6 months to a year
• Possible financial recession, it's been a good ten years now since the financial crisis. The trigger could be anything from Italy's budget, Saudi Arabia/Iran/Middle East, US/China tensions, Latin America, or even a botched up Brexit. 

Here are the items that grew in terms of exports and imports during September.

Commodity groups showing positive growth in exports during September

Commodity groups showing high growth in imports during September