U.S. machinery? Not so much

According to a report in Machinery and Equipment MRO, the United States is still Canada's dominant export market, but imports now come less and less from the U.S. It is based on a Statistics Canada study covering the period from 1990 to 2005 which shows that the marked drop in the U.S. share of imports is unprecedented in the history of Canada-U.S. trade.The study was released in March 2006 in the Canadian Economic Observer, published by Statscan.

About 40% of Canada's imports in 2005 came from countries other than the United States and Japan, an increase of more than 10 percentage points from the 1990s. Apart from China, Korea, Europe, Mexico and the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) profited from the lower share of imports from the United States and Japan to Canada in recent years.

Not surprisingly, the trade magazine was most interested in the fact that machinery and equipment, which is Canada's largest import group, was the most affected, with China and Mexico displacing U.S. products.

The United States accounted for about 54% of these imports in 2005, down from about 68% in 1990. Canada's imports of electrical and electronic products alone from the United States shrank by $10 billion between 2000 and 2005.

MRO is a trade magazine serving about 18,000 professionals in the machinery and utility industries. It is published by the Business Information Group. (MRO stands for "machinery, repair and operations").