Nigeria’s trade balance turns positive in Q4

Nigeria’s trade balance turned positive in the fourth quarter of 2016 after exports rose by more than half, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Saturday, the first positive reading since the same quarter a year ago.

But the country’s economy shrank by 1.5 percent over the course of the full year due to lower oil revenues and a shortage of hard currency, its first annual contraction in quarter of a century.

The fourth-quarter imports rose by 46.4 percent from the previous year to 2.31 trillion naira ($7.6 billion), NBS said.

But exports more than compensated for that rise, jumping 53.5 percent in value terms from a year earlier to 2.98 trillion naira, the statistics bureau said.

The balance of trade for the fourth quarter was 671 billion naira. The net trade balance stood at minus 290 billion naira ($953 million) for all of 2016.