TUNIS — Tunisia's trade deficit reached 14.96 billion dinars over the first seven months of 2026, against 11.9 billion dinars in the same period last year, according to figures published on Wednesday by the National Institute of Statistics (INS).
Exports rose 9.9 percent to 40.64 billion dinars. Imports rose faster, up 13.7 percent to 55.60 billion dinars. The result is a coverage ratio — the share of imports paid for by exports — of about 73 percent.
The single largest component of the gap is energy. The energy deficit alone stood at 7.95 billion dinars, more than half the total. Stripping it out leaves a non-energy deficit of 7.01 billion dinars.
What the number is actually saying
The export figure is not the problem. A 9.9 percent increase over seven months, in a year of weak European demand, is a real performance by Tunisian manufacturers and farmers. The deficit widened anyway, because the import bill grew from a base roughly 37 percent larger. When imports start higher, an equal percentage of growth on each side still widens the gap in dinars — and here the import growth rate was also the faster of the two.
That arithmetic is why export promotion alone cannot close the deficit at the current structure of trade. Tunisia would need export growth in the high teens, sustained for years, to catch an import bill of this size.
The energy line is the decisive one
Energy is where the discussion has to go, because 7.95 billion dinars is not a trade problem that trade policy can fix. It is the cost of a domestic production and consumption structure. Tunisia consumes more hydrocarbons than it produces, imports the difference at world prices, and additionally imports electricity and gas for a grid that has been under visible strain this summer, with repeated cuts reported across the country.
Two consequences follow. First, every dinar of the energy deficit is also a claim on foreign currency reserves, which is why the external position and the electricity supply are the same file, not two. Second, the non-energy deficit of 7.01 billion dinars — the part that manufacturing, agriculture and consumer imports actually control — is now smaller than the energy line. The productive economy is closer to balance than the headline suggests.
What is being proposed
The most direct lever cited by energy specialists and by the government's own planning documents is renewable generation. Each megawatt-hour produced domestically from solar or wind is a megawatt-hour of gas not imported, and Tunisia's Development Plan 2026-2030 places solar capacity and the ELMED electricity interconnection with Italy among its priority investments. The plan targets close to 30 billion dinars of investment in 2026, with energy among the identified sectors.
Economists have also pointed to the subsidy structure: as long as energy is sold below import cost, demand carries no price signal, and the state absorbs the difference in the budget while the country absorbs it in foreign currency. Reform proposals in this area — the most politically difficult of the options — typically pair a gradual tariff adjustment with targeted cash transfers to protect low-income households, the model applied in several countries in the region.
On the export side, the professional federations have consistently argued for the same measures: export credit and guarantee instruments to fund the working-capital gap that keeps mid-sized exporters small, and supplier-development programmes that move Tunisian firms up the value chain rather than leaving them as subcontractors on someone else's specification.
The July figures do not settle which of these is right. They do establish where the money is going.