IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/glh/wpfacu/251.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Tackling Discrepancies in Trade Data: The Harvard Growth Lab International Trade Datasets

Author

Listed:
  • Sebastian Bustos

    (Center for International Development at Harvard University)

  • Ellie Jackson

    (Harvard's Growth Lab)

  • David Torun
  • Brendan Leonard

    (Harvard's Growth Lab)

  • Nil Tuzcu

    (Harvard's Growth Lab)

  • Piotr Lukaszuk
  • Annie White

    (Harvard's Growth Lab)

  • Ricardo Hausmann

    (Harvard's Growth Lab)

  • Muhammed A. Yildirim

    (Center for International Development at Harvard University)

Abstract

Bilateral trade data informs foreign and domestic policy decisions, serves as a growth indicator, determines tariffs, and is the basis for financial and investment decisions for corporations. Accurate trade data translates into better decision-making. However, the raw bilateral trade data reported by UN Comtrade suffer from two structural problems: reporting differences between country partners and countries reporting in different product classification systems, which require product-level harmonization to compare data across countries. In this paper, we address these challenges by combining a mirroring technique and a data-driven concordance method. Mirroring reconciles importer and exporter differences by imputing country reliability scores and applying a weighted country-pair average to calculate the estimated trade value. We harmonize product classifications across vintages by calculating conversion weights that reflect a product’s market share. The resulting publicly available datasets mitigate issues in raw trade statistics, reducing reporting inconsistencies while maintaining product-level granularity across six decades.

Suggested Citation

  • Sebastian Bustos & Ellie Jackson & David Torun & Brendan Leonard & Nil Tuzcu & Piotr Lukaszuk & Annie White & Ricardo Hausmann & Muhammed A. Yildirim, 2025. "Tackling Discrepancies in Trade Data: The Harvard Growth Lab International Trade Datasets," Growth Lab Working Papers 251, Harvard's Growth Lab.
    • Handle: RePEc:glh:wpfacu:251
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://growthlab.hks.harvard.edu/sites/projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/2025-07-glwp-251-tackling-discrepancies-in-trade-data.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:glh:wpfacu:251. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chuck McKenney (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://growthlab.hks.harvard.edu/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.