Soviet Trade With West in Deficit in 1st Quarter After 1987 Surplus
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MOSCOW — Soviet trade with the West, which last year posted its first surplus in three years, slumped back into deficit in the first quarter of this year, according to statistics published Saturday.
The foreign trade journal Vneshnyaya Torgovlya said trade with the Western industrialized nations during the January-March period was in the red by $1.62 billion.
This followed a surplus of $487 million for all of 1987 and compared to a deficit of $877 million in the first three months of last year.
The statistics showed that trade with the United States rose dramatically during the first quarter of 1988 compared to the same period in 1987--from $254 million to $941 million.
West Germany remained the Soviet Union’s biggest Western trading partner at the start of 1988 with a total turnover of $2.9 billion, compared to $1.8 billion in the first quarter of 1987.
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