It is no question that international trade has been an engine for development for centuries. The movement of goods or provision of services between countries and continents have allowed not just the exchange of commodities, but of culture and ideas as well.
Trade practitioners in government, academia, research institutes and businesses will be pleased to know that the Statistics Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs has developed a new and enhanced to serve as an indispensable tool in all aspects of the study of international trade.
The UN Comtrade details imports and exports statistics in goods and services reported by the statistical authorities of close to 200 countries/areas since 1962. It is considered the most comprehensive online trade database available globally, with tens of billions of data points, representing more than 99 per cent of the world’s merchandise trade.
Launched worldwide today, the new UN Comtrade Database boasts of state-of-the-art features such as a more intuitive design, new data with more parameters, more powerful application programming interface (API) options and bulk download and data delivery, to name a few.
The revamped platform uses more interactive visualization features, enabling users to view the data without requiring extensive data skills. UN Comtrade has been collecting these visualizations developed by users and they are now accessible through . Another feature, , provides real-time analytics of recently released datasets and the data that users are looking for on Comtrade.
As the premier UN agency dealing with trade, investment and development issues, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) is one of the primary users, and beneficiaries, of the UN Comtrade Database. UNCTAD uses the data to construct various information products disseminated online in the . They also use it for economic analysis and policy formulation, shared through UNCTAD’s s, in policy briefs, research papers, and other publications. The data play a prominent role in studies on market access and market potential. Combining UN Comtrade data with labor statistics has also enabled UNCTAD to develop a set of indicators on gender and trade, which will soon be launched on UNCTADstat.
The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is another UN agency that relies on UN Comtrade data to get its work done. FAO’s mandate is to improve nutrition, increase agricultural productivity, raise rural populations’ living standards, and contribute to global economic growth. Among the key priorities to achieve this goal is the urgent need to eliminate hunger, food insecurity, and malnutrition. In these efforts, FAO plays a crucial role in providing up-to-date, reliable, and actionable data, including agrifood trade, on the state of food security and nutrition around the world to help guide policies and track progress toward these goals. The agricultural and food trade data found at comes from UN Comtrade.
Finally, UN Comtrade has been vital in assessing the impact of conflict and crises in the world. Since the beginning of 2000, international trade has fueled the emergence of global value chains – where countries depend on each other for primary, intermediate, and manufactured goods. With UN Comtrade monthly data, users are able to monitor and measure the movement of goods – even, and especially, during challenging times – helping to predict consumption and production patterns across the globe.
Sign-up as a user and access UN Comtrade data at your fingertips:
Photo: UN Photo/Albert González Farran