December foreign trade statistics

I wasn't planning another economic statistics post today. But the Latvian Statistics press release was too stunning.

In December 2007, Latvian exports increased by 12.9 % (compared to December 2006) while imports decreased 6.2%. Here is the graph comparing this to the previous months (export growth in red, import growth in blue):
Import growth has been slowing down since summer but this is the first month when Latvia is actually importing less than a year ago. The previous time when that happened was in 1999 when Latvia was still struggling with after-effects of 1998 Russian financial crisis (which involved bankcrupcies of several Latvian exporters and a major Latvian bank).

So, we are getting a quite dramatic economic slowdown now. And the curve looks like it's still heading even further down.

Developing...