Statistics

Trade with Muslim world growing faster than average

September 25th, 2006

Four of the United States’ Top 10 trade partners are among the nations with the world’s largest Muslim populations, a religion that has been in the news quite a bit lately:

• for statements linking the religion to a history of violence made by the Catholic church’s new top leader, Pope Benedict XVI, who later apologized;
• after a coup in Thailand overthrew Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra;
• after Sheik Hassan Nasrallah resurfaced last week vowing that Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement would never lay down its weapons;
• after the fifth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.
• as Iran’s leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, continued to challenge international efforts to subvert his nuclear ambitions.

Those four nations are not necessarily among those most often associated with large Muslim populations: China, Germany, France and Malaysia.

Although the Middle East is often the region most closely linked to the Muslim religion, only about 15-18 percent of the world’s Muslims are, in fact, Arabs, according to globalsecurity.org .

Based on a wikipedia entry listing the 60 nations with the world’s great Muslim populations, the United States registered $484 billion in total trade with 59 of those nations, an increase of 18 percent this year. (The United States ranks No. 41 on the list.)

That 18 percent growth is faster than the overall U.S. growth rate of 13.7 percent, according to WorldCity analysis of the most recent U.S. Census data, which is through July.

Among the Top 20 nations trading with the United States, another three, or a total of seven, are nations with significant Muslim populations: Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and India.

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