Advancing Un Comtrade for Physical Trade Flow Analysis: Addressing the Issue of Missing Values

Abstract

Trade contributes to the redistribution of resources among countries and regions. One of the most widely used data sources is the united nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database (UN Comtrade). Nevertheless, data issues still limit its validity, trustworthiness, and use. A critical issue is the lack of commodity weight information. It relies heavily on data quality to determine the global market's suppliers and consumers. Thus, trade needs reliable methods for filling in the missing physical values. We estimate missing physical values for commodities, countries/areas, and years using statistical approaches. The impact of handled data on countries and commodities varies considerably; for example, South Africa's net weight rose by 117% and commodity 91's by 63% (HS0, 1988-2019), compared with their original data. The directions of net trade flows for 10594 records have been reversed. Finally, the bilateral asymmetry problem improved. Overall, this paper introduces a novel approach for improving data accuracy.

Keywords: UN Comtrade, Physical trade, Missing physical value, Material flow analysis database