TUNIS — Tunisia's trade deficit widened to 12.6 billion dinars, about $4.2 billion, in the first half of 2026, up from 9.9 billion dinars a year earlier, as a 13.3 percent surge in imports outpaced export growth of 9 percent, according to figures reported by Arab News.

The numbers tell a double-edged story. Exports are genuinely growing — industrial goods and agri-food shipments among them — but the import bill, driven by energy, raw materials and consumer goods, is growing faster still.

What is holding the accounts together

Two flows are cushioning the gap. Tourism revenues reached about 3.68 billion dinars by July 10, up 4.5 percent year on year, and remittances from Tunisians abroad rose 5.1 percent to roughly 4.75 billion dinars, according to Tunisie Numérique. Together they total nearly 8.5 billion dinars — close to covering two-thirds of the trade shortfall on their own.

That cushion allowed the central bank to repay a roughly 700-million-euro Eurobond in July while keeping net foreign currency reserves at about 23 billion dinars, or 91 days of imports.

The structural problem

The reliance on beaches and the diaspora is also the critique: neither is a policy, and both are vulnerable — tourism to a bad season or regional shock, remittances to conditions in Europe. Economists have long pointed to the same underlying weaknesses: an energy deficit that makes every barrel of imported fuel a drain, and exports still dominated by low-margin goods rather than value-added products.

The way out others have taken

The fixes on the table are well documented. The African Development Bank and others point to accelerating solar and wind projects to shrink the energy import bill — the single largest component of the deficit — and to moving up the value chain, as the olive oil sector is attempting by shifting from bulk to branded exports. Morocco's growth in automotive and aerospace value chains is frequently cited in Tunisian policy debates as the regional proof that it can be done.

Until then, each summer the country will keep asking its tourists and its diaspora to balance the books.