Container ship in Bremerhaven
Photo: Mohssen Assanimoghaddam / dpa
Foreign trade stimulates the German economy in the corona crisis.
Despite the second corona wave, exporters got off to an unexpectedly good start into 2021 with important trading partners.
Their exports grew in January for the ninth month in a row, by 1.4 percent compared to the previous month, as the Federal Statistical Office announced on Tuesday.
Economists, however, had expected a decline of 1.2 percent.
Imports, on the other hand, fell by 4.7 percent compared to the previous month and thus more sharply than since April 2020.
Here experts had only assumed a decline of 0.5 percent.
In January, exporters sold goods worth 98.1 billion euros abroad.
Compared to January 2020 that was 8.0 percent less.
Exports to the EU countries fell by 6.0 percent, and those to the rest of the world by as much as 10.3 percent.
Exports to Great Britain fell particularly sharply by 29 percent after the Brexit trade agreement came into force.
In 2020, German exports fell by 9.3 percent to 1205 billion euros due to the Corona crisis.
The chances are not bad that foreign business will pick up this year.
The barometer for the export expectations of the industry climbed in February to its highest level for almost two and a half years, as the Ifo Institute found out in its monthly survey of 2,300 companies.
"The well-running economy in China and rising production in the USA are helping German exporters," said Ifo President Clemens Fuest.
The leadership in China expects growth of six to seven percent for the current year.
In the USA, too, the economy, which has been badly hit by the corona crisis, could recover more quickly than initially thought: Recently, the investment bank Goldman Sachs, for example, revised its growth forecast for the United States upwards to 6.8 percent.
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