ANKARA: Turkey became the European Union’s fifth-largest trade partner in 2015, according to data released by Eurostat. According to a new report on the surplus of goods in European international trade, the EU exported 2.04 trillion euros in goods during 2015 with the revenue of total imports standing at 1.79 trillion euros. In 2015,
Turkey’s exports to the EU rose to 79 billion euros from 75 billion euros, up 6 percent. Turkey’s imports from the EU surged to 61.6 billion euros, rising 13 percent year-on-year. Advances in both export and import numbers, in terms of quantity, pushed the Turkey-EU bilateral trade volume from 128.9 billion to 140.6 billion euros, up 9 percent from one year earlier, making Turkey the EU’s fifth-largest trade partner, surpassing Norway.
Norway’s trade volume with the bloc fell to 123.2 billion euros in 2015 compared to 135.3 billion euros in 2014, declining 9 percent. The United States maintained its title as the EU’s largest trading partner in 2015, with the bloc reaching 369.5 billion euros in exports and 246.2 billion euros in imports, due to the large size of its economy and its geographical proximity to East Asia. Exports and imports to the U.S. rose 19 percent.
In 2015, the EU’s second-largest trading partner was China. Last year, EU exports to China were worth 170.4 billion euros while imports were worth 350.3 billion euros. Moreover, China was followed by Switzerland and Russia in third and fourth place, respectively.
