OTTAWA—Canada’s goods-trade surplus with the rest of the world widened more than expected in February as record gold shipments helped drive the strongest export growth in six months.
The country posted a merchandise-trade surplus of 1.39 billion Canadian dollars, the equivalent of about USD$1.03 billion, Statistics Canada said Thursday. It marked a second monthly surplus in a row and topped the C$675 million expected by economists.
January’s surplus was revised up by $112 million to $608 million, a reversal from a C$400 million deficit in the final month of last year.
Merchandise exports jumped 5.8% to C$66.62 billion in the latest month, outpacing the 4.6% advance in imports to C$65.23 billion, the highest level since last June, the data agency said.
The strength in both imports and exports is a positive signal for industry-level gross domestic product, which Statistics Canada has estimated expanded 0.4% in February from the prior month following stronger-than-expected growth of 0.6% in January. Previously released data from the agency points to a further strengthening in factory trade and wholesale sales in February.
Stephen Brown, deputy chief North America economist at Capital Economics, said net trade looks to have made the bulk of the contribution to an anticipated acceleration in GDP growth for Canada, which he estimates at 2.5% in the first quarter of the year against roughly 1% annualized the prior quarter.
While exports were up in nine of the 11 product categories tracked, more than half of the growth in February was driven by exports of unwrought gold, including high-value shipments of refined gold and transfers of assets in the banking sector in a month when the bullion price was up sharply. Statistics Canada said that excluding the precious metal, exports were up 2.8% on the month before.