Economic Fact Of The Day

I see on the Dutch statistics bureau home page, that Germany is the largest trading partner (trade here being defined as the sum of both exports and imports) of 17 of the 26 remaining EU-countries, while Holland is Germany's largest trading partner. This reflects both that Germany is the biggest economy in Europe and that it's geographic position is so central in Europe and that it is relatively close to so many countries.

A non-EU country, Russia, is the biggest trading partner of two EU-countries, namely Lithuania and Finland.

Other countries that are biggest trading partner for an EU country includes Britain (for Ireland), Greece (for Cyprus), Italy (for Malta), Spain (for Portugal), France (for Spain), Lithuania (for Latvia) and Finland (for Estonia).

The pattern here is clearly that there are primarily two factors that determine the volume of trade: the size of the economy and geographic proximity.