Foreign Trade in Goods and Services: Comparing the Data Sources

The paper focuses on the primary sources of information on Russia’s foreign trade. The objective of the study is to describe the main sources of data on foreign trade in goods and services, and compare them according to such criteria as time horizon, specification by types of goods and services, the breakdown of data by country and region, and the data format.

The methodology tools rely on the possibility of applying databases for various user tasks (such as operative analysis, international comparisons, and studying the structure of foreign trade by types of goods and services and by partner countries).

The author shows that none of the databases meets all the criteria. To obtain a high-quality result, it is necessary to combine information from different sources. The paper demonstrates the problems of the incompleteness of the monthly data in the UN Comtrade database and uncertainty with the classifier at the junction of 2016-2017 in the Federal Customs Service TSVT database. The author reveals the data gaps in the UN Comtrade database for Russia for some commodity groups. The article presents a comparison of Bank of Russia, OECD, WTO, and UN publications.

The conclusions are given in the form of recommendations on the use of the databases depending on the users’ requirements according to the speed of data publication, availability of data for international comparisons, and the need to reflect the structure of Russia’s foreign trade by type of goods and services.

The analysis reveals individual structural components of foreign trade turnover and preferences in the use of information bases. For trade in goods, the author recommends a simultaneous usage of the Federal Customs Service TSVT database and the UN Comtrade database; for trade in services the use of the Bank of Russia, OECD or WTO databases (depending on the user’s task).

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