Foreign Trade

The country’s foreign trade indicated very high growth rate of up to 30% p.a. in the last two years. Even if the growth rate is assumed to be 10%, the current 5Mn ton of foreign trade traffic could double to 10Mn tons in the coming eight years.

However, Ethiopia’s international trade is dominated by imports, and 82% of goods moved consist of petroleum/petroleum products, chemicals, machinery, motor vehicles, heavy engineering and consumable goods.

Between 2004 and 2007, based on the data from the Central Statistics Agency, Ethiopian exports consisted of coffee, live animals, flower, oil seed, gold, leather products and chat.

A summary of international trade which demonstrates growth rates over the past 3 years of available statistical data, is summarised as follows:‐

	2004/05	2005/06	2006/07
Real Sector & Prices (% change over previous year)
Real GDP	12.6	11.6	11.4
Agricultural Value Added	13.5	10.9	9.4
Non‐Agricultural Value Added	11.8	12.2	13.2
Services	12.8	13.4	13.5
Consumer Price Index	6.8	12.3	17.8
Government Finance (% change over previous year)
Domestic Revenue (including grants)	12.4	15.5	26.3
Tax Revenue	13.7	14.2	22.6
External Grants	14.1	-18.1	103.2
Total expenditure	20.9	18.3	21.3
Overall Balance (including grants) (as % of GDP)	-4.4	-4.6	-3.6
External Sector (% change over previous year)
Exports	41.2	18.1	18.5
Imports	40.4	26.4	11.6
Average Exchange Rate Birr/US$	8.65	8.68	8.79
Reserve in months of imports	3.5	2.5	2.2
Total Merchandize Exports (Mio. US$)
Total Merchandize Imports (Mio. US$)
Total Trade Balance (Mio. US$)	-2786	-3593	-3941
Overall Balance of Payments (Mio. US$)	-97	-350

Information Origin – Central Services Agency Statistics 2002 to 2008

At present, the cost of trade transport is becoming very high due to increased transit charges, inefficient facilitation and inadequate capacities. Studies show that Ethiopia spends about 17% of its import value and 7% of its export earnings on transportation. It is clear that without drastic reduction of this high transport cost, it will be difficult to achieve competitiveness and development objectives.

Consequently, a new transport corridor strategy is required for both the improvement of trade and transport facilitation and the expansion of transport capacity to further strengthen the newly developed very promising inter‐modal transport arrangement.

The expected growth of the economy will no doubt produce increased traffic which calls for higher capacity and more efficient transport system. Also, the lack of domestic production of basic commodities as well as consumer goods places a high reliance on imported goods.

Therefore, the need for long term transport planning, as well as the urgency for such action, are further reinforced by the following factors:

i) Building transport capacity is time consuming;

ii) Transport demand/traffic tends to grow much faster than the growth of production and trade and;

iii) The sector serves as an effective catalyst greatly to facilitate the efforts of other socio-economic sectors to achieve their objectives.

Port availability and operational capacities are also critical to ensure fast and efficient loading/discharge of goods for both export and import. Therefore, the detailed feasibility report for this corridor will examine these issues at Djibouti. Future opportunities for Berbera, Mogadishu, Mombasa, Aseb etc. will also be examined.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-20