"China and India are playing a more and more crucial role in the trade flows of the 27 EU member states": in the run-up to the summit between the European Union and the two "Asian giants" (on Wednesday 28th November in Peking and on Friday 30th November in New Delhi, respectively), Eurostat has announced the import and export statistics for the period 2000-2006. In these six years’ period, "trade with China has grown by 150%, trade with India by 80%": the People’s Republic of China is by now the second greatest trade partner of the twenty-seven EU member states, after the United States; India is ninth. The EU Statistics Office noticed that, as an absolute value, EU exports to China have grown from 26 to 64 billion euros, while imports, which in 2000 amounted to 75 billion, are now worth the overall amount of 195 billion. "Because of this, the EU’s trade gap with Peking says the Eurostat experts has grown from 49 billion euros in 2000 to the current 131 billion euros". Of the EU member states, Germany is the greatest partner for China, followed by France and Italy; import-export trade flows with the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Sweden and Belgium are also very intensive.
