China becomes the biggest business and trading partner of the EU, overtaking the US in the last year.
China surely becomes the biggest business partner of the EU, continuing the trend from recent years. With most of major Europe’s partners, including the US, dipped due to the CORONA virus, China hits a number of $709bn in trade between the Asian country and the European countries, compared to $671bn worth of imports and exports from the US during the last year.
Despite the fact that China’s economy slowed down significantly in the first quarter of the year due to the pandemic, the quick economic recovery later in 2020 fuelled demands from the EU countries.
In fact, China became the only major global economy in the world that has seen some significant growth in the last year, exporting everything from luxury goods to cars to the European countries in 2020.
According to Eurostat: “In the year 2020, China was the main partner for the EU. This result was due to an increase in imports (+5.6%) and exports (+2.2%)”.
The figures shared by Eurostat, the EU’s statistical office, are pretty similar to official data published by China in January this year, showing the trend of growing trade with the EU, with a growth of 5.3% by $696.4bn in the previous year.
According to Eurostat figures, the EU’s deficit with China also grew from $199bn to $219bn. The information was released last Monday.
Compared to these results, the trend of trade between EU countries and the US declining remains. Despite the fact that the US and the UK remain the largest export markets of the EU, trade with both countries has seen a major decline as shown by the statistics from last year.
“Trade with the United States recorded a significant drop in both imports (-13.2%) and exports (-8.2%),” the statistics agency commented on the results of the research.
The political effect on trade between the US and the EU resulted in a series of tit-for-tat disputes, which led to tariffs on steel and other products such as American Harley Davidson motorcycles and French Cognac.
With the new president ahead of the US, it is still not clear how and if Joe Biden will re-evaluate and change the course of approach towards trade with the EU partners. Meanwhile, China and the EU are making their trading and economic relationship stronger, with both sides seeking to ratify an investment deal that will allow better access to the China market by the European companies.