(Adds economist comment)
By Jan Strupczewski
BRUSSELS, April 17 (Reuters) - Euro zone exports plunged by a quarter in February against a year earlier and imports fell by more than a fifth, showing the severity of the global trade slump and pointing to shrinking GDP in the first quarter.
Exports from the 16 countries using the euro to nations outside the currency bloc plummeted 24 percent to 99.2 billion euros ($130 billion) and imports tumbled 21 percent to 101.2 billion, the European Union's statistics office, Eurostat, said.
This produced an external trade deficit of 2.0 billion euros in seasonally non-adjusted terms against a surplus of 1.7 billion euros a year before.
Seasonally adjusted, the gap was even bigger at 4 billion euros, Eurostat data showed, versus an adjusted 5.4 billion in January. Exports rose 0.5 percent from January to 103.3 billion and imports fell 0.8 percent to an adjusted 107.2 billion euros.
"The latest data suggest that net exports acted as a greater drag on the economy in Q1 than in Q4, when they subtracted a full percentage point from quarterly GDP," said Jennifer McKeown, European Economist at Capital Economics.
"February's trade data support the picture from the industrial data that euro-zone GDP could have fallen more sharply in Q1 than Q4's 1.6 percent quarterly drop," she said.
"This suggests that even our below consensus forecast for the economy to contract by 4 percent this year could prove to be too optimistic," she said.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development said that last month world trade was in free fall and should decline by 13.2 percent in 2009.
A detailed trade breakdown for February was not yet available, but January data showed the trade gap in energy shrank to 17.3 billion euros from 26.5 billion in January 2008 but also the surplus in machinery and vehicles trade halved to 5.8 billion.
The euro zone's surplus with its biggest trading partner, Britain, fell to 3.5 billion euros in January from 4.9 billion a year before and more than halved to 1.8 billion with the United States.
The euro zone's trade deficit with China stayed virtually unchanged from a year earlier at 11.4 billion euros in January and shrank to 2.7 billion from 4.6 billion with Russia, which supplies a large part of the area's oil and gas. (Reporting by Jan Strupczewski, editing by Victoria Main)