Singapore‘s foreign trade grew at a year-on-year rate of 30.9% in May, according to data from Enterprise Singapore.

At an annual rate, exports rose 29.8%, to 47,353 million dollars.

In the opposite direction, imports were 41.599 million dollars, an increase of 32.2 percent.

With this, the country registered a deficit of 5.754 million Singapore dollars in its foreign trade of products.

In context, Singapore’s economy expanded 1.3% year-on-year in the first quarter, compared to a contraction of 2.4% in the previous quarter.

On a seasonally adjusted quarter-on-quarter basis, the economy grew 3.1%, extending the 3.8% expansion in the fourth quarter of last year.

In particular, the manufacturing sector expanded 10.7% year-on-year, slightly faster than the growth of 10.3% registered in the previous quarter.

The growth was driven by production expansions in the electronics, precision engineering and chemicals groups, which outpaced production declines in the transportation engineering, general manufacturing and biomedical groups.

On a seasonally adjusted quarter-on-quarter basis, the manufacturing sector grew 10.8%, recovering from the 1.4% contraction of the previous quarter.

Foreign trade

According to the central bank of Singapore, in its outlook for last February, the world economy is expected to recover with the start of mass vaccinations, but uncertainty is high.

Global GDP is also expected to expand 1.7% in the first half of 2021 over the previous half, before rebounding to 3.1% in the second half, taking full-year growth to 5.8 percent.

Financial conditions remain favorable, while governments have implemented additional supportive policies.

The start of mass vaccination programs in many countries has raised confidence.

However, these projections assume that the pandemic will be largely contained by mid-year. The main risk to the outlook is that vaccination programs may be slower or less effective than anticipated

On a monthly basis, Singapore’s total foreign trade decreased 0.8% in May 2021, following a 2.6% decrease in April 2021.