Trade Statistics

A INSIGHTS strives to work as much as possible with primary sources, in this case National Trade Statistics, to ensure that:

With the sources currently connected to, we cover 98%-99% of the total monthly Frozen Potato Products Trade volume.

Our process of gathering trade statistics ensures that at least once every month new data is gathered from trade sources, depending on the frequency of filing new data. When gathering data we ensure that data for 14 months is gathered, including 13 historical months, in order to cover potential re-instatements in previous periods. The period is carefully chosen since sources won’t do re-instatements further than 1 year ago.

One of the key challenges when working with multiple different input sources that are strongly related is that data can differ (e.g. import in one source is for the other source related to export figures). As a result, when not correcting for these changes using an extensive cleaning process, export of country X to country Y differs from what is mentioned by Country Y as import from country X.

We at A-INSIGHTS have developed a methodology to ensure that these differences doesn’t occur and data, by taking exports as the primary source for trade and pivoting exports to import data as well. Based on thoroughly and ongoing statistic analysis, export data is in 99% of the cases significantly more reliable than import data. This is mainly due to the known “Rotterdam Effect - quasi transit effect”.

In short, this comes down that imports from countries with big ports such as The Netherlands with Rotterdam are overstated since product that are only traded via the port but are not originally coming from that country are being included in the import data. However, the exporting country, in this example The Netherlands, exclude these trades from the export data to ensure that exports corresponds with the real exports. 

When export data isn’t available and import data is, for example trade imports by India from the Philippines since statistics are not covered for Philippines but are covered for India, import data is being used as the input source and pivoted to export data for the Philippines in this specific case.

International trade in goods statistics, like many published statistics, must balance the need for timely information with the need for accuracy. The detailed data sent for a given month are subject to the possibility of later revision as a consequence of errors, omissions or — particularly with the Intrastat system — late declarations by the providers of the statistical information. When monthly results already sent to Eurostat are subject to revision at national level, revised results are to be transmitted no later than the month after they become available.

The impact of a revision will depend very much on the data user and what use they make of the data. To aid both the monitoring of revisions and users’ understanding of their impact, Eurostat and Member States have agreed on thresholds to define different levels of revision at the aggregate level.

Value

Image Rotterdam Quasi Transit Effect