Early trade data from Seoul strikes an optimistic note for Asia

To get an early sense of trade patterns in eastern Asia, we can consider figures from one of the region's major exporters. South Korea releases staggered, month-to-date import and export figures well before a calendar month is completed.

The nation's customs service publishes 10-day, 20-day and 25-day export and import figures as a calendar month evolves. We are already able to see the data for the first 20 days of June, and it's showing a promising trend: the year-on-year export growth rate was 8.5%, an improvement from the 10-day result (which tends to be more volatile due to the small sample size).

The 20-day figure is showing that imports were roughly flat year-on-year.

After drilling down into this data, we can also chart month-by-month bar charts for years of export data, with each bar showing the positive or negative contribution of different segments of individual months. We've also included two more charts showing the broad correlation of South Korea's trade trends with those of China, India, Japan and the ASEAN bloc.

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