First Time User
What is UN Comtrade?
UN COMTRADE is the pseudonym for United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database. Over 140 reporter countries provide the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) with their annual international trade statistics data detailed by commodities and partner countries. These data are subsequently transformed into the United Nations Statistics Division standard format with consistent coding and valuation using the UN/OECD CoprA internal processing system.
The UN COMTRADE is the largest depository of international trade data. It contains well over 1.1 billion data records and is available on the internet!
All commodity values are converted from national currency into US dollars using exchange rates supplied by the reporter countries, or derived from monthly market rates and volume of trade. Quantities, when provided with the reporter country data and when possible, are converted into metric units. Commodities are reported in the current classification and revision (HS2002 in most cases) and are converted all the way down to the earliest classification SITC revision 1. Therefore, if data is received in HS 2002 version, it is converted to HS1996, HS1988, SITC rev. 3, SITC rev. 2, SITC rev. 1 and BEC. The data are permanently stored in the UN COMTRADE database server.
Commodities are classified according to SITC (Rev.1 from 1962, Rev.2 from 1976 and Rev.3 from 1988), the Harmonized System (HS) (from 1988 with revisions in 1996 and 2002) and Broad Economic Categories (BEC).
Time series of data for reporter countries starts as far back as 1962 and goes up to the most recent completed year. Current data is published annually in the International Trade Statistics Yearbook and can be purchased through the UN Sales department.
The UNSD holds the copyright to COMTRADE data. All rights reserved. Users cannot disseminate COMTRADE raw data without the express permission of the UNSD.
For further information, see UN Comtrade Manual Sets
Browser Warning: UN Comtrade works best with Internet Explorer Web Browser. In other browsers, some pages might not work properly.
How to search for help
In general, we advise you to consult first the UN Comtrade Knowledge Base for questions related to use of UN Comtrade, definitions of terms or interpretation of data. If you do not find your answers, please write to comtrade@un.org for further information.
For questions related to subscriptions, please write to subscriptions@un.org
How to query data
Depending on your information need and level of expertise of the UN Comtrade system, the website offers flexibility in finding the necessary trade data. Consider the following scenarios below:
(i) Using Search for data Box, also known as Comtrade Explorer [Any Pages]
There are two search options available, data and help. For data, you can enter only commodity code or text, partner or reporter code or name, and related commodity trade variables. The output would yield several pages with the results in tag clouds. For example, the search term could be the name of the country, the country's abbreviation, a commodity key word or a year. Examples: "aircraft" or "aircraft engine". The tag clouds appear as years for which the commodity selected is available. The first result shows that year 2004 has the largest value for that commodity. Clicking data availability option just below gives all the reporters and years for which the selected commodity (-ies) is/are available.
(ii) Using Shortcut Query [Front Page]
If reporter or partner is known, Shortcut Query is the easiest tool. Just type the commodity text on the box, select reporter/partner and click Search. The system will search the latest available data.
(iii) Using Basic Selection [Menu Data Query à Basic Selection]
Basic selection option is a little more sophisticated but still user friendly. You can search for commodities within the commodities tab. Within the reporters tab you can select one or more reporters from the drop down list or choose your customized country groups or my favorite reporters. The latter two options are available to UN Comtrade subscribers only. It is the same for partners tab also. You can select years depending on your need in the years tab. The others tab allows the user to filter trade data by value and also allows the user to choose a preset sort order.
After choosing all the appropriate options for your query you can save your query for future use. You can also allow for batch notification. Batch notification will send a notice to your email address once the query execution is completed. Please note these two options are also limited to subscribers of the UN Comtrade database only.
(iv) Using Express Selection [Menu Data Query à Express Selection]
The Express selection query option is for the more advanced user of UN Comtrade. It too has all the features of the Basic Selection query but in a more compact window.
For commodities, you have the option to choose individual commodities or just chapters. All specifies all commodities within the selected revision. AG0, AG1, … AG6 are aggregate level and refer to all commodity codes beginning with the specified digits. LF or leaf refers to the basic code and does not include any of the detailed children. Wildcard * is used to find a string of zero or more characters. Wildcard ? is used to find individual characters. The Advanced Items tab is the same as in the Basic Selection.
How to find out data availability
There are several ways to view data availability. Data availability is also available as downloadable XML files as Web Services. Here are two ways to visualize Data Availability:
(i) in Graph [Menu Data Availability à In Graph]
Data Availability (# of reporters or # of records) is shown as bar chart by commodity classification. It is also possible to define the selection filter.
(ii) in Tag Cloud & Map [Menu Data Availability à In Tag Cloud & Map]
Tag Cloud visualizes data by combining font size and color. As general rule of thumbs, the bigger the font the bigger the datasets available.
Another way to show is using map which provides familiar background (world map) to user and adding layer to show availability of data.
Subscriber Information [Why Subscribes?]
The UN Comtrade Web Site offers several features for personalization. Users can save the query (called Saved Queries), and save individual items as favorites, such as commodity favorites, reporter favorites, partner favorites and year favorites. Users can define their own country groups (which combine several reporters) or commodity groups. Global country groups have already been defined, so users can just attach them to favorites and use later in Basic Selection or Express Selection.
Users can customize their FrontPage and Download Format, or even submit a query into a batch (and an e-mail notification will be sent upon completion of the query). Users can thus avoid having a "Time out" message and have a "powerful" research tool.
Subscription Prices are explained here.
Site License Subscription Trial
Site License Subscription Trial is available for organizations / universities / companies. In the request, you must include organization/company name & address, contact person and the IP addresses used by your organization for access to the Internet.
Site License subscription, which is based on IP recognition, allows individual members of your organization to have automatic access with full functionalities including download of data.
Once we receive the IP addresses we will proceed with the setup of the free trial subscription.
Please send trial request to comtrade@un.org
