The country’s trade deficit in October eased to $3.31 billion, the narrowest recorded since May 2021, data released by the Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) showed.
The PSA said the trade deficit in October decreased by 13.5 percent from the $3.82 billion posted a year ago.
The trade deficit of $4.84 billion in the previous month recorded an annual increase of 27.1 percent, while in October 2021, it posted a year-on-year hike of 86.6 percent.
The country’s total export sales in October 2022 amounted to $7.7 billion, reflecting an increase of 20 percent from the $6.41 billion recorded a year ago.
Year-to-date total export earnings stood at $66.01 billion posting an increase of 6.3 percent from the $62.1 billion in the same 10-month period last year.
Meanwhile, total imported goods in October 2022 amounted to $11 billion, up 7.5 percent from $10.23 billion in October last year.
The year-to-date annual total import value reached $115.99 billion, up 22.7 percent from the year-to-date annual total import value of $94.5 billion in January to October 2021.
Michael Ricafort, Rizal Commercial Banking Corp. chief economist, said in a statement the narrower trade deficit may have to do with the lower global crude oil prices at new lows in nearly a year recently, which led to some rollback in local fuel pump prices in recent months.
“Other major global commodity prices such as wheat, soybean, natural gas, coal, iron, steel, copper, nickel, among others started to ease in recent weeks, thereby could help reduce the country’s import bills, narrow the trade deficit; as well as help ease inflationary pressures for the coming weeks, as leading indicators for both trade deficit and overall inflation,” Ricafort said.
“The significant improvement in the trade deficit data may have fundamentally helped stabilize and even improved the peso exchange rate,” he added.
