Representative file image. , Photo credit: SR Raghunathan
India’s merchandise exports for 2022-23 jump from earlier estimates to nearly $451 billion, showing a year-on-year growth of 6.9%, according to commerce ministry data, with exports hitting a nine-month high for March reached 41.9 billion dollars. ,
Initial estimates for March pegged exports at $38.38 billion, registering a sharp decline of 13.9%, but the revised numbers indicate a contraction of only 6%. Exports at $41.9 billion crossed the $40 billion mark in only the second month of March 2022-23 after $42.3 billion in outbound shipments last June.
The ministry, which will release preliminary estimates for April’s merchandise trade on Monday, also revised March’s import bill to over $60 billion, the highest in 2023, raising the preliminary estimate of imports during the month by $1.9 billion. Gave.
remained unchanged
However, the total import bill for 2022-23 remained almost unchanged at $714.04 billion, an increase of 16.5% over 2021-22, as against $714.24 billion initially. The increase in March’s import figure was largely offset by a $1.7 billion improvement in the November 2022 import tally, which was initially pegged at $58.2 billion, then revised upward by half a billion dollars, and finally 56.95 billion dollars.
The latest revisions of the official business numbers kick off a year, which economists have dubbed much larger than normal variations between the preliminary estimates and the final numbers.
Total exports were initially pegged at $447.46 billion according to data released on 15 April, then revised to $444.2 billion according to a ministry statement on 1 May. This figure has now increased to $450.95 billion. Similarly, the import bill as per the May 1 statement was pegged at $711.85 billion from the initial estimate of $714.24 billion.
Overall, the export numbers through 2022-23 were revised by more than $25 billion from their initial estimates, with four months seeing an upward revision of more than $3 billion. The pace of these revisions has accelerated since November 2022, with exports increasing by an average of $3.2 billion per month. The revision in March exports at $3.52 billion was the second highest in the year.
The revision in import figures till 2022-23 has been only modest, at an average of over $1.5 billion per month. More than $2 billion in revisions from initial estimates were reported over the four months, with the highest revision recorded in December 2022 of nearly $3 billion.
While experts have identified petroleum shipments as the main driver for the exceptionally high revision of recent export data, the revision in import numbers requires further scrutiny.