Pak-Afghan Trade Slips to $720.4mln in July-January

The State Bank of Pakistan’s (SBP) latest data showed exports to Afghanistan declined to $633.1 million in the July-January period of FY2020, compared to $676.2 million in the corresponding period a year earlier. Imports, during the period, slid to $87.2 million from $98.7 million.
In January, exports to Afghanistan sharply fell to $89.9 million compared to $141.5 million in the same month a year earlier and $110.5 million in December last year. Monthly imports also decreased to $9.4 million in January from $13.5 million in the corresponding month a year earlier and $16.6 million in December 2019.
The landlocked Afghanistan depends on products’ inflows from Pakistan to meet its consumer needs. Pakistan is also used as a transit corridor for supply to the neighbouring country, fetching revenues for the tax authorities.
However, the cross-border trade slowed in the recent past due to strict monitoring and increasing cost of transit and bilateral trade, according to a last month’s report by a state-run Trade Development Authority of Pakistan (Tdap).