It’s a rule of thumb in international (trade) relations: if you have a small home country, you have a large foreign country. For the Netherlands, that foreign country is called Germany. We maintain close relationships with our largest neighbor in all respects. With a trade volume of 172 billion euros in 2020, the Dutch-German trade relationship is one of the largest in the world and the German and Dutch economies are therefore strongly intertwined.
Germany is our most important trading partner. Not only in terms of exports and imports, thanks to the port of Rotterdam, the Netherlands is the most important transit country in the EU. Germany, in turn, is the most important transit country to other European countries.
The largest export partner
After China, the Netherlands is the most important supplier of goods for Germany. In 2021, we exported goods worth 133.4 billion euros to our large eastern neighbour, compared to 106.8 billion a year earlier. The top 5 of these exports are crude oil and petroleum products, household appliances, fruit and vegetables, various manufactured goods and telecommunications equipment. Those 133 billion are also enormous in a relative sense: in 2021 we exported to our second export partner, Belgium, for around 63 billion, to the British for around 38 billion euros.
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Fourth import partner
Conversely, we also import the necessary from Germany: in 2021 for over 92 billion euros. The top 5 consists of road transport vehicles, household appliances, specialized machines, medicines and pharmaceuticals, and miscellaneous machines. This makes us the fourth largest importer of German goods. The largest remain the United States with almost 122 billion euros, followed by China (103.6 billion) and France (102 billion).
What else comes to us from Germany: food and live animals, beverages and tobacco, raw materials, mineral fuels, animal and vegetable oils and numerous chemicals. In short, pretty much everything that makes a country work.
Services
Both Germany and the Netherlands have an important service sector. Important? Both countries earn about 70 percent of their gross domestic product. Think of the banking sector, insurance companies and transport and logistics companies, services that are also exported. In 2020, we exported 27.5 billion euros of services to Germany and imported 22.2 billion euros. This includes transportation services, telecommunications and information technology services, industrial services, travel, construction services and financial services.
Border
We share a border of approximately 576 kilometers with the Germans. There is free movement of goods, services, capital and people, and we have a common currency. The economic potential of this border region is therefore great.
The Netherlands borders the two German states of Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia, the Netherlands’ most important trading partner, where more than 70,000 Dutch people live. Together with the states of Baden-Württemberg, Lower Saxony and Bavaria, North Rhine-Westphalia accounts for more than 85% of Dutch-German trade.
Apart from mutual permanent residence (there are more than 150,000 compatriots living throughout Germany, around 77,000 Germans find refuge with us), around 52,000 Dutch and Germans are so-called cross-border workers who respectively work and live on the other side of the border.
Sources consulted: Netherlands Enterprise Agency, CBS, Chamber of Commerce, the website of the German Embassy in The Hague and the Consulate General in Amsterdam
Document: Commercial data-Germany-July-2022.pdf
Document: Internationalization Monitor Germany 2020.pdf