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Where data development meets worldwide tradeAccess new datasets, real-time insights, and experimental tools to explore today's progressing trade landscape Visualization tools based upon WTO trade stats and tariffs Real-time trade insights based upon non-WTO information sources List of freely accessible non-WTO trade information sources WTO's data partnerships for research purposes The Global Trade Data Portal has now been relabelled to "Data Lab" to focus on information development, collaborations, and enhanced access to external information sources.
We develop verified, thorough, and prompt evidence about trade and industrial policy modifications worldwide. Our outputs are quickly available to all stakeholders, always.
On this subject page, you can find data, visualizations, and research on historical and current patterns of global trade, as well as conversations of their origins and effects. SectionsAll our work on Trade & Globalization Among the most essential advancements of the last century has actually been the combination of nationwide economies into a global economic system.
One method to see this development in the information is to track how exports and imports have altered over time. The chart here does this by revealing the volume of world trade considering that 1800, adjusting the figures for inflation and indexing them to their 1800 worths.
The long-run information we present here originates from the work of historians and other scientists who draw on historical sources such as archival customs records, early statistical yearbooks, and other main files. These historic price quotes provide us a broad view of how global trade progressed, however they are harder to update, which is why not all charts (and not all series within some charts) encompass the present.
What these long-run quotes permit us to see is that globalization did not grow along a constant, constant course. Rather, it expanded in two major waves. The chart below presents a collection of readily available historical trade price quotes, revealing the development of world exports and imports as a share of worldwide economic output. What is revealed is the "trade openness index".
Each series corresponds to a various source. The greater the index, the higher the influence of trade deals on global financial activity.2 As the chart shows, up until 1800, there was a long duration identified by constantly low global trade globally the index never exceeded 10% before 1800. Background: trade before the very first wave of globalizationBefore globalization removed, trade was driven mainly by colonialism.
Leonor Freire Costa, Nuno Palma, and Jaime Reis, who assembled and published historic price quotes, argue that trade, also in this duration, had a considerable favorable effect on the economy.3 This then altered throughout the 19th century, when technological advances set off a period of significant development in world trade the so-called "first wave of globalization". This first wave came to an end with the start of World War I, when the decline of liberalism and the increase of nationalism resulted in a downturn in worldwide trade.
After The Second World War, trade started growing again. This new and ongoing wave of globalization has seen international trade grow faster than ever before. Today, the sum of exports and imports across nations totals up to more than 50% of the value of overall international output. The following visualization shows a comprehensive summary of Western European exports by location.
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 nearly folded the duration. However, this process of European integration then collapsed greatly in the interwar duration. You can alter to a relative view and see the proportional contribution of each region to total Western European exports.
In addition, Western Europe then started to progressively trade with Asia, the Americas, and, to a smaller level, Africa and Oceania. The next chart, utilizing data from Broadberry and O'Rourke (2010 ), reveals another perspective on the combination of the global economy and plots the advancement of three indicators measuring integration throughout various markets specifically goods, labor, and capital markets.4 The indications in this chart are indexed, so they reveal modifications relative to the levels of integration observed in 1900.
26 The worldwide expansion of trade after World War II was largely possible since of reductions in transaction costs coming from technological advances, such as the development of business civil air travel, the improvement of performance in the merchant marines, and the democratization of the telephone as the main mode of interaction.
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 items and services becoming more common).
The following visualization, from the UN World Development Report (2009 ), plots the portion of total world trade that is accounted for by intra-industry trade, by type of items. As we can see, intra-industry trade has actually been going up for main, intermediate, and final products.
Why 2026 Will Be a Defining Year for ServiceYou can modify the countries and areas selected; each nation informs a different story.7 The very same historic sources also enable us to check out where nations sent their exports with time. This breakdown by destination provides a complementary view of globalization: not only did nations integrate at different minutes, but the partners they traded with also changed in different methods.
These figures are obtained from modern trade records, customs information, and worldwide databases. With this information, we can track existing patterns in trade volumes, trade structure, and trading partners. (You can learn more about information sources and measurement concerns at the end of this page.) Trade openness (exports plus imports as a share of gdp) demonstrates how large a country's cross-border circulations are relative to the size of its domestic economy.
International trade is much smaller relative to the domestic economy in the United States than in nearly all European nations. This is partially explained by the large volume of trade that takes location within the European Union. If you push the play button on the map, you can see how trade openness has actually changed over time across all countries.
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