Bangladesh's trade deficit narrowed 8 percent year-on-year to 5.32 billion U.S. dollars during the July to October period of the 2018-19 fiscal year ending in June next year, an official said Thursday.

The Bangladesh Bank (BB) official, who asked to be unnamed, told Xinhua that the country exported 13.41 billion dollars of goods while it imported items worth 18.73 billion dollars in the first four months of the current 2018-19 fiscal year (July 2018-June 2019).

The overall trade deficit in the same period of the previous 2017-18 fiscal year (July 2017-June 2018) was 5.79 billion dollars when Bangladesh's export earning and import payment stood at 11.36 billion and 17.14 billion dollars respectively, he said quoting the BB data.

In the first four months of the current fiscal year, the BB data showed that Bangladesh's export and import earnings surged 18.08 percent and 9.28 percent respectively compared to the same period a year earlier.

The BB official said the growth in imports which usually hovers around 20-25 percent slumped to a single digit since the beginning of the fiscal year.

He said imports slump as businesses take a wait-and-see approach ahead of the country's general elections slated for Dec. 30.

However, the BB official said comfortable receipts of remittances from 10 million non-resident Bangladeshis living and working abroad as always help the central bank cushion the impact of trade deficit.

According to the BB data, Bangladeshis remitted home 5,108 million dollars from July to October this year against 4,553 million dollars in the same period a year ago.