Trade Trends In Ethiopia Case Study

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2 Trade Trends of Ethiopia and COMESA countries Ethiopia’s trade balance has always been heavily in the negative. What is more the structure of both exports and imports are highly skewed to EU. The EU is Ethiopia’s favorable export market. Accordingly, for over half a decade on average, over one third of the total export was destined to this market, followed by Asia (18 percent) and the Middle East (16 percent). But considering the dynamics, the shares of Asia and the Middle East are fast increasing at the expense of the EU. Considering individual markets, Germany is by far the major destination markets for Ethiopia’s export, followed by Japan, Saudi Arabia, Italy and China. The structure of imports, however, differs from that of exports. In this regard, Asia has a share of one-third of Ethiopia’s import; EU over one-fourth; and the Middle East about one-fifth. In the context of individual countries, China and Saudi Arabia together accounted for nearly one-third of total import (for about 15 percent each), followed by United States and India. A handful of mainly raw agricultural products make up for the bulk of exports, including coffee, oilseeds, edible vegetables and vegetable products, hides and skins and to a smaller extent gold. These account for over 80…show more content…
Over the last five years Ethiopia’s export to Africa figured about 14 percent of total. Of course, this is quite a significant share. However, this is due to some opportunistic activities by business individuals in Djibouti and Somalia that are engaged in re-exporting (mainly edible vegetables and vegetable products) from Ethiopia to the Middle East as they incur lower cost than Ethiopia for port services. Take away Djibouti and Somalia, what is left for other African’s share is a small proportion – 4.8 percent of total merchandize exports. As for imports, Africa share is only 5 percent of

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