UN Comtrade: find who trades what with whom, by product
The UN's database of official international trade statistics, searchable by reporter, partner and product, with free public access and paid bulk options.
The site: UN Comtrade. Cost: Freemium. Useful for: culture and countries.
What it is
UN Comtrade is the United Nations database of official international trade statistics. It holds imports and exports reported by around 200 countries and areas, covering more than 99 per cent of world merchandise trade, with annual and monthly data by product and trading partner. Some data goes back to 1962.
The public version is free but limits how much you can pull at once; the University of Toronto library guide puts the cap at 50,000 records. A premium subscription adds bulk downloads and unlimited API use. Products are identified by commodity codes from the Harmonized System (HS), the international product classification used by customs authorities.
Use it for
- Sizing import demand for a product in a target country
- Finding which countries supply a market, and how that has shifted
- Spotting export opportunities by comparing partners for the same product
- Checking claims about trade flows in news stories or pitch decks
It answers a question few other free tools can: not just how big a market is, but where its supply actually comes from.
How to use it
- Go to comtradeplus.un.org and open the trade data query.
- Choose the reporter (the country whose data you want) and the partner, or all partners.
- Pick the trade flow, such as imports or exports, and the period.
- Enter the product by its HS commodity code; look the code up first if you do not know it.
- Preview the results and download them, keeping within the public record limit.
Start with a broad code and one year, then narrow down. Small, focused queries are faster and stay well within the free limit.
Example
A small olive oil exporter could set the reporter to Japan, the partner to all countries, the flow to imports and the product to the HS code for olive oil. The result lists the countries Japan buys from and the value of each flow by year, a starting point for judging how crowded the market is.
Watch out for
- Each country reports its own figures, so one country’s reported imports rarely match its partner’s reported exports.
- Product codes are broad and change between HS editions, so a code may mix your product with others.
- The public version caps the records you can pull; large extracts need a paid plan.
It works well alongside World Bank Open Data, Google Trends and Company annual reports.
Checklist
Put it to work
Recap cards
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Sources and credits
