R.I. ranks 20th for export growth YTD despite August fall

PROVIDENCE – Rhode Island again ranked 20th among the 50 states in export growth for the first eight months of 2014, posting a 5.1 percent increase in foreign sales compared with the prior-year period, even though exports fell 20 percent from July to August, according to e-forecasting.com.

Year-to-date, Hawaii claimed the top spot for the second month in a row with export growth of 128.7 percent during the same period, while Utah came in last (-34.3 percent). Massachusetts ranked 17th with 5.6 percent growth, and Connecticut, 38th, for a 4.5 percent drop.

However, on a month-to-month basis, foreign sales from Rhode Island exporting companies fell 20.4 percent in August, following an increase of 21.8 percent in July.

A total of $182.9 million in goods were shipped to international markets from Rhode Island in August, e-forecasting.com said, a 5 percent increase from the August 2013 total, e-forecasting.com said.

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Exports of manufactured goods – a contributor to economic development and the driving force of local jobs – accounted for 71 percent of all state exports in August. Shipments abroad from state factories increased in August by 6.8 percent from the previous month to $130.6 million. The year-over-year increase for foreign shipments from state manufacturing companies was 15.2 percent.

Exports of non-manufactured goods – agricultural goods, mining products and re-exports – decreased 51.3 percent in August on a month-to-month basis to $52.3 million.

For the country as a whole, America’s exports of goods stalled in August to $138.8 billion, the same value as in the previous month.

In the first eight months of 2014, world merchandise exports rose 2.6 percent from the same period in 2013 to $11.3 trillion dollars, according to the latest numbers on global trade flows released by the World Trade Organization.

WTO’s trade figures on exports from January to August of 2014 show that the United States slipped to third place after years as the world’s second-largest exporter. So far this year, foreign sales hit a little more than $1 trillion, which is $34 billion or 3.3 percent more than what was sold in the first eight months of 2013.

China was the world’s leading exporter, selling abroad $1.5 trillion of goods so far this year, 3.8 percent more than in 2013. Germany moved up as the second-largest exporter in the world with foreign sales hitting $1 trillion, 6.8 percent more than during the first eight months of 2013.

In its new semiannual World Economic Outlook published this month, the International Monetary Fund said that the global economy is “still struggling to get on track.”

“Global growth is still mediocre,” Olivier Blanchard, economic counselor and head of the IMF’s Research Department, said in a statement.

IMF said the volume of exports for industrial countries is expected to average 3.6 percent growth in 2014 and accelerate to 4.5 percent in 2015.

“In view of these trends, Rhode Island companies doing business abroad are expected to witness somewhat better levels of export orders from their major foreign markets next year, especially from clients in emerging economies,” e-forecasting said in a press release.

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