National Export Initiative goal of doubling US exports in 5 years is decades out of reach at current pace.
Back in 2010, the year this blog launched, we wrote about the National Export Initiative (NEI) just nine months into the US government’s 5-year campaign to double exports. In Aiming High, we wondered then if the goal was realistic … here’s what our projected path to doubling exports looked like in 2010:
Here, from the vantage point of our May 2013 data on US exports of goods, is what actually has happened:
US exports of goods did grow 46.44% between the low point of 2009 and last year. But the pace of growth slowed, then steeply declined in 2012.
At this rate, says Drewry Maritime Research, the NEI goal won’t be reached until 2032.
In this week’s Container Insight, Drewry crunches the US export numbers for both goods and services ( which grew 78% between 2009 and 2012, but account for only 30% of total US exports). Drewry concludes: the NEI shortfall shows “how difficult it is to centrally engineer a recovery and has not reduced the US container imbalance between exports and imports.”