Reconciling International Trade Data

Karam Shaar

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: International trade data are in substantial measurement error. Data reported by some countries mean next to nothing. This study develops an index of trade data quality based on the consistency between a country’s claims on bilateral trade and the corresponding claims of the rest of the world from 1962 to 2014. The index takes the relative significance of each partner and data availability into account. We produce a more reliable set of bilateral and total international trade data using the index. Findings include (a) the actual exports of most countries with low data quality are considerably higher than self-reported. (b) Corruption and poor data quality are strongly correlated. (c) Global trade data quality has been deteriorating in the past three decades even though more countries have improved their data quality over time. This is because low-quality reporters have recently increased their share in global trade. (d) China tends to under-report exports and over-report imports. (e) There is only a trivial difference between US self-reported and reconciled data. The same applies to all high-quality reporters. We recommend future studies on trade use our reconciled data.

Keywords: Trade data quality; data discrepancy; trade data reconciliation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C02 C18 F1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/81572/9/MPRA_paper_81572.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Reconciling International Trade Data (2019)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:81572

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter ().