How To Make The Optimum Use Of Import-Export Data

Posted by yashi ganguly on January 17th, 2018

Huge volumes of goods are traded as imports and exports. Data about these goods thus traded, provides valuable insights on different aspects about the trade. Few of the insights that can be gathered from the import export data include – the nature of goods that are traded, monetary worth of the goods, the volumes of trade that happens, the companies which are involved in the trade, the countries from whom the goods are imported and to whom the goods are being exported, the specific ports where the trade happens, etc.

This information can be obtained from various sources – the trading reports of the companies, data published by the ports, data published by official sources, private agencies who keep a track of the imports and the exports, etc. The information gathered from the trading companies consist of  data relating to the particular goods that have been imported or exported, the monetary value of the goods and other details. This is information on the micro level. The data published by different government agencies would vary depending on the purpose of the report. The information from the ports would be more on the lines of the type and volumes of the goods which have gone through the ports. Other government agencies publish information which are macro level and do not contain specific information of importers and exporters. Few of the private trade agencies try to collate all these information and publish reports which are related to their area of interest.

 Any firm , which would want this data needs to check out these multiple sources of information, verify on the authenticity of each of these sources and be able to come up with a collated and relevant data which would be useful for the analysis. This does require a lot of effort. However, thanks to certain databases, all this information is being stored in one centralized location. Accessing these databases will provide the information that is required about the various variables related to the international trade. This data is available both at the micro level by outlining the details of the trade done by each of the trading companies as well as on the macro level which provides the information of the overall volume of the trade which took place. This holistic import export data available on these databases provide the base information from which the specific data that any firm is looking for can be taken and analyzed.

Written By:- Aarti Shukla