Open Trade Statistics by UOFT

Open Trade Statistics (OTS) was created with the intention to lower the barrier to working with international economic trade data. It includes a public API, a dashboard, and an R package for data retrieval.

The project started when I was affected by the fact that many Latin American Universities have limited or no access to the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database (UN COMTRADE).

There are alternatives to COMTRADE, for example the Base Pour L’Analyse du Commerce International (BACI) constitutes an improvement over COMTRADE as it is constructed using the raw data and a method that reconciles the declarations of the exporter and the importer. The main problem with BACI is that you need UN COMTRADE institutional access to download their datasets.

After contacting UN COMTRADE, and suggesting to them my idea of doing something similar to BACI but available for anyone but keeping commercial purposes out of the scope of the project, I got an authorization to share curated versions of their datasets.