The Hong Kong Trade Development Council said the city’s exports this year would suffer their largest decline in a decade due to the impact of the ongoing trade war between China and the United States, reported the South China Morning Post.
Hong Kong’s trade promotion body predicted that the city’s exports would shrink 4% by value, the worst performance since 2009 when they plunged 12.6% during the depth of the global financial crisis. The forecast marked a significant downgrading of a previous prediction that exports would grow 2% in 2019.
The outlook came on the same day China’s Customs Administration published a detailed breakdown of trade data showing that shipments from the mainland to Hong Kong fell 7.7% in the first eight months of this year, compared to the same period in 2018 – a faster rate of decline than the 6.3% drop in the first half of the year.