You're reading: Deficit of Ukraine’s balance of payments up to $859 million in March

The deficit of Ukraine's consolidated balance of payments in March 2016 increased to $859 million, and this deterioration is largely to the first payment of coupon in the amount of $473 million on new government domestic loan bonds issued by the government in November 2015, the National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) reported on its website.

The regulator noted that in March last year the deficit was $308 million, in February this year $74 million, while surplus of $120 million was recorded in January 2016.

In addition, the deficit of the current account of the balance of payments in March reached $448 million compared to $251 million in February and $228 million in March last year. The National Bank explained that the pace of decline in exports increased to 15.9% from 12% in February, while the rate of fall in imports slowed down to 6.2% from 8.8% in February.

In general, for the first quarter of this year the current account deficit amounted to $842 million, or 5.3% of GDP, which is more than twice exceeded the figure of the first quarter of 2015 – $429 million (2.4% of GDP).

The matter with the consolidated balance of payments is worse: in January-March 2016 its deficit was equal to $813 million against a surplus of $2.537 billion in January-March 2015.