All Categories
Featured
Table of Contents
Where data innovation fulfills international tradeAccess new datasets, real-time insights, and experimental tools to check out today's evolving trade landscape Visualization tools based upon WTO trade statistics and tariffs Real-time trade insights based on non-WTO information sources List of easily available non-WTO trade data sources WTO's data partnerships for research purposes The Global Trade Data Portal has now been relabelled to "Data Laboratory" to focus on information development, collaborations, and enhanced access to external information sources.
We create confirmed, detailed, and prompt proof about trade and commercial policy changes worldwide. Our outputs are quickly accessible to all stakeholders, always.
On this subject page, you can find data, visualizations, and research on historical and existing patterns of international trade, in addition to conversations of their origins and results. SectionsAll our work on Trade & Globalization One of the most essential advancements of the last century has actually been the integration of nationwide economies into an international financial system.
One way to see this development in the data is to track how exports and imports have actually changed 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 values. You can switch this chart to a logarithmic scale. This will assist you see that, over the long term, development has approximately followed a rapid course.
Industry Trends for 2026 and the Global OverviewThe long-run data we provide here comes from the work of historians and other researchers who draw on historic sources such as archival customizeds records, early statistical yearbooks, and other main files. These historical quotes give us a broad view of how worldwide trade progressed, but they are harder to upgrade, which is why not all charts (and not all series within some charts) reach the present.
What these long-run quotes enable us to see is that globalization did not grow along a stable, constant path. What is revealed is the "trade openness index".
Each series represents a various source. The greater the index, the greater the impact of trade transactions on global economic activity.2 As the chart shows, till 1800, there was an extended period identified by constantly low worldwide trade internationally the index never went beyond 10% before 1800. Background: trade before the very first wave of globalizationBefore globalization removed, trade was driven mostly by colonialism.
Leonor Freire Costa, Nuno Palma, and Jaime Reis, who compiled and published historical price quotes, argue that trade, also in this duration, had a considerable favorable effect on the economy.3 This then changed throughout the 19th century, when technological advances triggered a duration of significant growth in world trade the so-called "very first wave of globalization". This very first wave came to an end with the start of World War I, when the decline of liberalism and the rise of nationalism caused a slump in worldwide trade.
After World War II, trade started growing again. This brand-new and continuous wave of globalization has seen global trade grow faster than ever previously.
In the duration 18301900, intra-European exports went from 1% of GDP to 10% of GDP, and this indicated that the relative weight of intra-European exports nearly doubled over the duration. This procedure of European combination then collapsed sharply in the interwar period.
In addition, Western Europe then started to progressively trade with Asia, the Americas, and, to a smaller sized extent, Africa and Oceania. The next chart, using data from Broadberry and O'Rourke (2010 ), shows another viewpoint on the integration of the international economy and plots the evolution of 3 signs measuring integration throughout various markets particularly goods, labor, and capital markets.4 The indications in this chart are indexed, so they reveal changes relative to the levels of combination observed in 1900.
26 The worldwide growth of trade after World War II was largely possible due to the fact that of decreases in transaction expenses coming from technological advances, such as the advancement of business civil air travel, the improvement of productivity in the merchant marines, and the democratization of the telephone as the primary mode of interaction.
The first wave of globalization was defined by inter-industry trade. In the 2nd wave of globalization, we see an increase in intra-industry trade (i.e., the exchange of broadly comparable items and services ending up being more common).
The following visualization, from the UN World Development Report (2009 ), plots the portion of overall 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 last goods. This pattern of trade is essential since the scope for specialization boosts if nations can exchange intermediate items (e.g., vehicle parts) for associated last products (e.g., cars and trucks). Share of intraindustry trade by type of products Figure 6.1 in UN World Advancement Report (2009 ) After taking a look at the international patterns behind the first and 2nd waves of globalization, we can look at how these patterns played out within individual nations.
You can modify the countries and regions selected; each nation tells a different story.7 The same historical sources also allow us to check out where nations sent their exports with time. This breakdown by location offers a complementary view of globalization: not just did countries integrate at various minutes, but the partners they traded with also altered in different methods.
These figures are originated from modern-day trade records, custom-mades information, and international databases. With this information, we can track present patterns in trade volumes, trade composition, and trading partners. (You can check out more about data sources and measurement problems at the end of this page.) Trade openness (exports plus imports as a share of gdp) shows how large a country's cross-border flows are relative to the size of its domestic economy.
International trade is much smaller sized relative to the domestic economy in the US than in practically all European countries, for example. This is partly discussed by the large volume of trade that happens within the European Union. If you push the play button on the map, you can see how trade openness has altered gradually across all nations.
Latest Posts
10 Essential Tips for Successful Global Scale
Driving Global Enterprise Expansion
Leveraging AI-Driven Business Intelligence to Driving Strategic Decisions