After the fall

World trade

After the fall

Jul 27th 2009
From Economist.com

The collapse in world trade has stopped, but there is no sign of a recovery

AFP

 

 

WORLD trade has been one of the worst casualties of the global economic slowdown and the source of some particularly startling figures. Towards the end of last year trade all but collapsed. According to the World Bank, the value of exports from a sample of 65 countries accounting for 97% of world trade rose by 20.2% in September, compared with a year earlier. But by November exports were worth 17.3% less than a year earlier, before slumping by a whopping 32.6% in the year to January. In March the managers of South Korea’s Busan port, long one of the world’s busiest, said that it had run out of space to store nearly 32,000 empty containers. The Baltic Dry Index, which measures demand for the ships that transport bulk goods such as iron ore or coal, fell from 11,793 at the end of May last year to a pitiful 663 in early December.

 

Estimates by the World Trade Organisation suggest that trade volumes will shrink by around a tenth this year. But recent figures from big economies give reasons to hope that the worst of the slump may now be past. Even in May, the value of trade was nearly a third lower than a year earlier. But the recent awful figures mask the fact that exports and imports have held more or less steady since January.

 

Month-on-month changes in exports give a better sense of the decline, and these point to a slump in trade that was particularly dramatic at the turn of the year but which has since hit bottom. The World Bank estimates that the value of exports for the 44 large economies (which together account for three-quarters of world trade) plunged by 7.4% in October and then by 15.4% in November, before holding steady in December and then shrinking by another 12.2% in January this year. Since then, however, the value of trade has more or less held steady.

 

Other indicators have also improved, though they are still well below pre-crisis levels. The Baltic Dry Index has recovered from its pitiful low, creeping back up to 3,345 on July 24th. The monthly import cargo volume at big retail container ports in America exceeded 1m TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) for the first time in four months during May, according to the National Retail Federation.

 

It is too early, however, to conclude that trade will bounce back. one reason for the rapid fall was that retailers, faced with falling demand, ran down their stocks. With those gone, new orders must be placed to meet demand. This partly explains the end of the collapse. So does the fact that governments have pumped vast sums of money into economies as part of fiscal and monetary expansions. For now, this is propping up global demand for traded goods.

 

But for a sustainable recovery in trade, global demand has to recover on its own steam. It is not clear where demand might come from. American consumers have lost much of their astonishing appetite for goods ranging from clothes to iPods to computers. American households are now saving 5% of their incomes, up from essentially nothing a year ago. Unemployment in America and elsewhere will continue to rise. The International Labour Organisation estimates that the global jobless tally will increase by between 21m and 50m this year.

 

More people out of work will mean a further fall in global demand. China's boom (GDP grew by 7.9% in the second quarter) is fuelled by government investment and by the stimulus, not a rise in private consumption. Nor are other consumers stepping in. Without a move towards more private consumption in countries such as Germany and China, the world is in for a prolonged period of slow growth and correspondingly sluggish trade.

 

Over the past two decades the spread of a global supply chain has allowed trade to grow exceptionally fast, and the benefits have been shared more widely than in earlier eras. Luckily, the more open world trading system which allowed trade to thrive has not collapsed. If open trade survives, trade could recover smartly when the world economy does. But given the fundamental problem of deficient demand still facing the world economy, a recovery in trade is likely to be some time coming.