Malta's trade volumes will grow by 105 per cent in the next 15 years according to the newly released HSBC Trade Connections, HSBC's new quarterly global forecast.

The report predicts that Malta will remain important as a core trading route between Europe and North Africa, and increasingly to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Canada and Russia.

HSBC Trade Connections predicts that world trade volumes will grow by 73 per cent by 2025. Despite the current economic climate and a partner survey of international traders showing a downturn in confidence in the short term, trade will grow by two per cent year-on-year until 2015.

This is a volume increase of about eight per cent with international trade activity growing, on average, by just under $1trillion a year between now and 2015.

HSBC Trade Connections predicts that Egypt, India, Vietnam, Indonesia, China and Brazil will be the international powerhouses that drive world trade growth in this period.

Egypt is predicted to experience the fastest growth in international trade values – albeit from a low base – of 185 per cent by 2025.

This is being driven partly by the country's redevelopment following the Arab Spring of 2011 but also because other countries around the world are seeing it as a gateway to the Middle East.

China's bounce-back from the 2009 collapse in world trade was phenomenal and as a nation, China rose from accounting for 8.4 per cent of world trade in 2009 to 10.9 per cent of world trade in 2010.

The forecast predicts China's share of world trade will reach 13 per cent by 2025 overtaking the US as the top trading nation, driven both by commodities trading and by an increase in manufacturing in China.

As the centre of international business shifts from developed to emerging markets, HSBC Trade Connections finds today's biggest developed trading nations are adapting how they do business to maintain their competitive advantage.

Malta's report and others is available at:

http://tradeconnections.corporate.hsbc.com/en/News-and-Opinion/HSBC-Trade-Connections-Reports-Launch.aspx

Sign up to our free newsletters

Get the best updates straight to your inbox:
Please select at least one mailing list.

You can unsubscribe at any time by clicking the link in the footer of our emails. We use Mailchimp as our marketing platform. By subscribing, you acknowledge that your information will be transferred to Mailchimp for processing.