Reconciling International Trade Data

Karam Shaar

EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: International trade data are filled with discrepancies–where two countries report different values of trade with each other. I develop a novel trade data quality index for reconciling the discrepancies in bilateral trade data. I calculate the quality for each country’s imports and exports separately for every year from 1962 to 2016 and reconcile international trade data by picking the value reported by the country with higher data quality in every bilateral flow. The reconciled data reshape our views on international trade: (a) countries with low data quality under-report their imports and exports: low-quality reporters are 14% more open to trade using reconciled data; (b) corruption, the level of development, and erroneous reporting can explain data quality; (c) importers’ data are more accurate; (d) China tends to under-report its exports and over-report its imports, while there is only a small difference between US self-reported and reconciled data.

Keywords: Trade data quality; Data discrepancy; Trade data reconciliation; International trade (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C18 C20 F01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
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://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/206629/3/e ... ion%20Nov%202019.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Reconciling International Trade Data (2017)
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:zbw:esprep:206629

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in EconStor Preprints from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().