Open Trade Statistics Database (Q8844)

The Open Trade Statistics initiative was developed to ease access to international trade data by providing downloadable SQL database dumps, a public API, a dashboard, and an R package for data retrieval. This project was born out of the recognition that many academic institutions in Latin America lack access to academic subscriptions and comprehensive datasets like the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database. The OTS project not only offers a solution to this problem regarding international trade data but also emphasizes the importance of reproducibility in data processing. Through the use of open-source tools, the project ensures that its datasets are accessible and easy to use for research and analysis. OTS, based on the official correlation tables, provides a harmonized dataset where the values are converted to HS revision 2012 for the years 1980-2021 and it involved transforming some of the reported data to find equivalent codes between the different classifications. For instance, the HS revision 1992 code '271011' (aviation spirit) does not have a direct equivalent in HS revision 2012 and it can be converted to the more general code '271000' (oils petroleum, bituminous, distillates, except crude). The same process was applied to the SITC codes. Country codes are also standardized in OTS. For instance, missing ISO-3 country codes in the raw data were replaced by the values expressed in UN COMTRADE documentation. For instance, the numeric code '490' corresponds to 'e-490' but it appears as a blank value in the raw data, and UN COMTRADE documentationindicates that 'e-490' corresponds to 'Other Asia, Not Elsewhere Specified (NES)'. Commercial purposes are strictly out of the boundaries of what you can do with this data according to UN Comtrade dissemination clauses. Visit tradestatistics.io to access the dashboard and R package for data retrieval.