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Where information innovation meets global tradeAccess new datasets, real-time insights, and experimental tools to check out today's evolving trade landscape Visualization tools based upon WTO trade stats and tariffs Real-time trade insights based on non-WTO data sources List of freely accessible non-WTO trade data sources WTO's information collaborations for research study functions The Global Trade Data Website has now been relabelled to "Data Laboratory" to focus on data development, partnerships, and enhanced access to external data sources.
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On this topic page, you can find data, visualizations, and research study on historical and present patterns of worldwide trade, along with conversations of their origins and impacts. SectionsAll our work on Trade & Globalization One of the most essential advancements of the last century has actually been the integration of national economies into an international economic system.
One method to see this growth in the information is to track how exports and imports have actually altered over time. The chart here does this by revealing the volume of world trade since 1800, adjusting the figures for inflation and indexing them to their 1800 values.
The long-run data we provide here comes from the work of historians and other researchers who draw on historical sources such as archival customs records, early analytical yearbooks, and other main documents. These historical estimates offer us a broad view of how worldwide trade progressed, however they are harder to upgrade, which is why not all charts (and not all series within some charts) extend to today.
What these long-run quotes allow us to see is that globalization did not grow along a steady, constant course. Rather, it broadened in 2 significant waves. The chart listed below presents a collection of offered historical trade estimates, showing the development of world exports and imports as a share of international financial output. What is revealed is the "trade openness index".
Each series represents a various source. The higher the index, the higher the impact of trade transactions on international economic activity.2 As the chart shows, until 1800, there was a long duration identified by persistently low international trade worldwide the index never ever exceeded 10% before 1800. Background: trade before the first wave of globalizationBefore globalization removed, trade was driven primarily by colonialism.
Leonor Freire Costa, Nuno Palma, and Jaime Reis, who put together and published historic quotes, argue that trade, also in this period, had a significant positive effect on the economy.3 This then altered throughout the 19th century, when technological advances activated a period of significant growth in world trade the so-called "very first wave of globalization". This first wave pertained to an end with the beginning of World War I, when the decrease of liberalism and the increase of nationalism caused a slump in worldwide trade.
After The Second World War, trade began growing once again. This new and ongoing wave of globalization has actually seen international trade grow faster than ever before. Today, the sum of exports and imports throughout countries amounts to more than 50% of the worth of overall worldwide output. The following visualization shows a comprehensive introduction of Western European exports by destination.
In the duration 18301900, intra-European exports went from 1% of GDP to 10% of GDP, and this implied that the relative weight of intra-European exports practically folded the duration. This procedure of European combination then collapsed dramatically in the interwar duration. You can change to a relative view and see the proportional contribution of each region to overall Western European exports.
In addition, Western Europe then began to progressively trade with Asia, the Americas, and, to a smaller level, Africa and Oceania. The next chart, utilizing information from Broadberry and O'Rourke (2010 ), reveals another viewpoint on the combination of the global economy and plots the development of three indications measuring combination throughout different markets particularly items, labor, and capital markets.4 The indicators in this chart are indexed, so they reveal modifications relative to the levels of integration observed in 1900.
26 The worldwide growth of trade after World War II was mostly possible since of reductions in deal costs originating from technological advances, such as the advancement of commercial civil aviation, the improvement of performance in the merchant marines, and the democratization of the telephone as the primary mode of communication.
The very first wave of globalization was characterized by inter-industry trade. In the second wave of globalization, we see an increase in intra-industry trade (i.e., the exchange of broadly similar goods and services ending up being more common).
The following visualization, from the UN World Advancement Report (2009 ), plots the fraction of overall world trade that is accounted for by intra-industry trade, by type of goods. As we can see, intra-industry trade has actually been going up for main, intermediate, and last items.
You can modify the countries and regions picked; each country tells a different story.7 The exact same historic sources also allow us to explore where countries sent their exports in time. This breakdown by location supplies a complementary view of globalization: not only did countries integrate at various moments, however the partners they traded with also changed in different ways.
These figures are stemmed from modern trade records, customizeds information, and international databases. With this information, we can track current patterns in trade volumes, trade composition, and trading partners. (You can find out more about information sources and measurement problems at the end of this page.) Trade openness (exports plus imports as a share of gross domestic product) reveals how large a nation's cross-border circulations are relative to the size of its domestic economy.
International trade is much smaller sized relative to the domestic economy in the United States than in practically all European nations, for instance. This is partially described by the big volume of trade that occurs within the European Union. If you press the play button on the map, you can see how trade openness has actually altered in time throughout all nations.
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