XN000022-1996-03-14 — Page 13

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Comparing the three months ending January 1996 with the three months ending January 1995, decreases in the value of domestic exports were registered for office machines and automatic data processing machines (by $1.3 billion or 25%); clothing (by $916 million or 4.7%); photographic apparatus, equipment and supplies, optical goods, watches and clocks (by $426 million or 8.6%); telecommunications and sound recording and reproducing apparatus and equipment (by $420 million or 15%); and textiles (by $177 million or 4.8%).

Over the same period, increases in the value of domestic exports were recorded for electrical machinery, apparatus and appliances, and electrical parts thereof (by $2.1 billion or 32%); and manufactures of metals (by $173 million or 16%).

The value of imports increased by 24% over a year earlier to $130.3 billion in January 1996.

Changes in the value of imports from 10 main suppliers are shown in Table 5.

Comparing January 1996 with January 1995, the value of imports from all main suppliers showed increases of various magnitudes: Italy (+69%), Malaysia (+57%), Germany (+44%), the United States (+35%), Taiwan (+33%), the United Kingdom (+28%), South Korea (+25%), Singapore (+20%), Japan (+19%) and China (+15%).

Comparing the three months ending January 1996 with the three months ending January 1995, the value of imports from all main suppliers showed increases of various magnitudes: Malaysia (+43%), Italy (+40%), the United States (+28%), Singapore (+17%), South Korea (+16%), Taiwan (+15%), Germany (+9.7%), China (+9.3%), the United Kingdom (+8.4%) and Japan (+7.6%).

Table 6 shows changes in the value of imports of 10 principal commodity

divisions.

Comparing the three months ending January 1996 with the three months ending January 1995, increases were recorded in the value of imports of most principal commodity divisions. More notable increases were registered for electrical machinery, apparatus and appliances, and electrical parts thereof (by $8 billion or 20%); office machines and automatic data processing machines (by $5.1 billion or 36%); telecommunications and sound recording and reproducing apparatus and equipment (by $3.7 billion or 11%); miscellaneous manufactured articles consisting mainly of baby carriages, toys, games and sporting goods (by $2.1 billion or 9.5%); general industrial machinery and equipment, and machine parts (by $1.9 billion or 23%); and textiles (by $1.8 billion or 6.1%).