Impact of COVID-19 on Trade in Pakistan

Economies worldwide have been greatly affected by the COVID-19 outbreak. A study demonstrated that trade shrunk by 3.5% globally. The above-presented dashboard aims to explore how the pandemic has affected Pakistan’s economy by determining the strength of correlation between the balance of trade connecting certain commodities. For this purpose, data has been used from the annual analytical report on External Trade Statistics of Pakistan, 2019-2020. This dataset includes information on exports, imports, and the Balance of Trade for different commodities.

For analysis, groups of commodities like Petroleum, Machinery, Chemicals, Transport, Food. Metals and textile have been created. We analyse these groups based on their values and their shares among the imports and exports. We further analyze the % change in the value of the imports and exports of the commodities mentioned above. It can be observed from the dashboard that among imports, the primary commodities affecting the economy are petroleum, machinery, chemicals, and transport for 2019. But in 2020, the share of machinery became the top import, whereas petroleum’s value decreased. Moreover, food and metals were imported more. This resulted in an extremely larger value of imports for 2020. Among exports, we found that textile and food created the most value. Over 2019-2020, the value generated by textiles increased, due to which the value generated by exports also increased massively. This caused a further massive increase in the balance of trade for 2020, which indicates that we should export more textiles.

Inherently, the balance of trade (BOT) is the difference between the value of a country's exports and the value of a country's imports for a given period. Once we analyzed the Imports and Exports for the FY19 and FY20, we set out to see how the change in exports and imports affect the Balance of Trade (BOT). We analyze the change in the BOT over a period of time. It can be concluded that although exports and imports changed throughout the pandemic period, not much of an effect was seen on the Balance of Trade (BOT).