Baku, Azerbaijan, May 10
By Ali Mustafayev – Trend:
Kazakhstan’s current account had a small deficit of $95 million in January-March 2018, which is 14.7 times less than the current account deficit in the same period of 2017, the press service of the National Bank of Kazakhstan said in a message.
"The increase in the trade surplus against the backdrop of a recovery in energy prices has become a key factor in reducing the current account deficit. In particular, the trade surplus on preliminary data in the reporting period amounted to $6.1 billion, increasing by 41.7 percent compared with the corresponding period in 2017," the message said.
Export of goods in January-March 2018 increased by 25.9 percent and amounted to $13.8 billion. The export of oil and gas condensate (60.3 percent of total exports) increased by 35.5 percent due to price increase and quantitative volumes. In turn, exports of non-ferrous metals increased by 8.5 percent, ferrous metals exports slightly decreased - by 2.2 percent, grain exports almost doubled.
Import of goods in the reporting period increased by 15.7 percent and amounted to $7.8 billion.
The growth of imports occurred over all groups of the main commodity nomenclature, according to the National Bank of Kazakhstan.
Incomes of foreign direct investors in January-March 2018, in turn, increased by 6.7 percent to $4.6 billion. More than half of the non-residents' income from direct investments was channeled to finance Kazakh subsidiaries.
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