Panama Export Data: $3.37B in 2023, Down 7.8%

Exports Have Fallen Sharply for Five Straight Years

Panama exported $3.37 billion worth of goods in 2023, down 7.8% from $3.65 billion in 2022. That decline extends a much longer slide. Exports stood at $10.48 billion in 2019, then fell to $8.66 billion in 2020 as the pandemic disrupted global trade flows through Panama's ports and free trade zones. The drop then accelerated. Exports fell to $3.78 billion in 2021, roughly a third of the 2019 level, and have eased only slightly further in the two years since. The 2022 and 2023 figures sit close together, within a few hundred million dollars of each other, suggesting the export base has settled into a new, much smaller range rather than continuing to slide.

A country whose export total shrinks by roughly two-thirds over five years is not simply riding out a temporary downturn. The scale of the decline points to a structural shift in what Panama sells and how much of it moves through the country's trade infrastructure, rather than a single bad year that a rebound could quickly erase. Panama's economy leans heavily on services, shipping and logistics tied to the canal. Merchandise exports were always a smaller, more concentrated piece of the picture than the trade volumes those other sectors handle. What this dataset captures is that smaller slice, and it has consolidated even further around a single commodity in recent years.

Copper Concentrate Accounts for Nearly Three-Quarters of Exports

Ores, slag and ash led every export category in 2023, worth $2.47 billion, or 73.3% of the total. No other category comes remotely close. That output came from the Cobre Panama copper mine, one of the largest copper mines opened anywhere in the past decade. Panama's Supreme Court unanimously ruled the mine's operating contract unconstitutional on November 28, 2023, and the government moved to shut the mine down that same month, following months of mass protests over the deal. The mine operated for most of 2023 before that closure, which is why copper concentrate still dominates this dataset's export figures for the year even though the operation has since gone dark.

Every other category on the list is small by comparison. Fruit and nuts ranked second at 5.1% ($172.00 million), and fish and crustaceans followed at 3.8% ($129.47 million). Animal, vegetable and microbial fats and oils added 2.8% ($93.33 million). Iron and steel contributed 1.7% ($55.90 million), and pharmaceutical products brought in 1.6% ($54.28 million). Wood and articles of wood added 1.1% ($36.90 million), and food industry residues and prepared animal fodder contributed 1.0% ($33.78 million). Coffee, tea and spices added 0.9% ($29.62 million), and copper articles, a smaller downstream category distinct from the raw ore above, closed out the top ten at 0.8% ($28.34 million). Every one of the other nine categories on this list, added together, still falls well short of matching what ores and slag contributes on its own, a gap that leaves little room for any of them to move the total meaningfully in either direction.

China Buys Nearly Four in Ten Dollars of Panama's Exports

China purchased 39.1% of Panama's exports in 2023, worth $1.32 billion, more than the next five partners on this list combined. Japan ranked second at 13.1% ($442.34 million), and the South Korea followed at 6.9% ($233.06 million). Together, those three buyers made up 59.2% of total export value.

Spain took 6.1% ($204.68 million), and India added 5.2% ($174.20 million). The United States purchased 4.5% ($152.26 million), and Germany contributed 4.2% ($141.83 million). Bulgaria added 3.2% ($108.93 million), and the Netherlands contributed 2.7% ($92.10 million). A regional catch-all category covering smaller Asian markets not tracked individually closed out the top ten at 2.2% ($73.82 million).

China, Japan and South Korea, the three largest buyers, all rank among the world's major copper-consuming and smelting economies, a detail that lines up directly with the ore figure described above. Raw copper concentrate has to go somewhere for processing, and this partner list shows where that processing capacity sits.

Taken together, Panama's 2023 export data describes an economy that has consolidated sharply around a single mineral export, sold overwhelmingly to a small handful of Asian buyers, just as the mine behind most of that value was ordered to close. The next few years of this dataset will show whether that concentration holds, fades, or gets replaced by something else entirely.