ISLAMABAD, June 5: The trade gap stood at $2674.20 million during the period July-May of 2003-04, denoting the unprecedented increase of 128.21 per cent over the same period of previous year , it was revealed in the aggregate figures released by the Federal Bureau of Statistics here on Saturday.

As a proportion of exports, the deficit will consume nearly a quarter of the exports (24.18% to be exact), while during the corresponding period, it had constituted 11.84% of exports.

The spiral of trade gap is obviously attributable to the galloping imports, which stood at $13,735.26 million up 24.10pc, thus nullifying any gain from upward swing of exports in the current financial year.

Export during the period under review stood at $11,061.05 million, showing an increase of 11.77pc over the corresponding period.

In terms of the ratio of exports to imports too, the situation is far from rosy, as evident from the FBS statistics. Whereas in July-May 2002-03, exports had covered 89.41pc of the imports, their ratio during the period under review plummeted by about 9pc to 80.53pc.

With only one month of the year 2003-04 left, the exports are found trailing the target of $11,183 million for 11 months by $122 million. To achieve the official target of $12,200 million for the current financial year, the month of June will have to raise exports to $1139 million.

This, however, seems to be a tall order in view of the rather sluggish pace of exports over the past couple of months, because the increase of 11.77pc is the gift of the earlier months of 2003- 04, as evident from the figures for May 2004.

During that month, the exports amounted to $1060.03 million, down 3.27pc from the previous month (April 2004). As compared to corresponding period of the previous year, these show a negligible increase of only 1pc.

The performance of imports was, however, quite the opposite and was quite robust. In May, the country imported goods worth $1,729 million during the period under review, up 14.62pc from the previous month and 78.29pc over the corresponding period.