Having been weak since 2015, the purchasing managers' index (PMI) -- which represents the overall business conditions in the manufacturing sector -- has improved clearly of late in the advanced economies as well as the emerging and commodity-exporting economies (Chart 6). Looking at imports in emerging economies, those in the Chinese and the ASEAN economies bottomed out and then picked up.
Given that the weakness in emerging economies' imports had accounted for the major part of the slow trade, the ongoing recovery in their imports is likely to have a positive impact on a wide range of advanced economies' manufacturing sectors.