INTERNATIONAL MERCHANDISE TRADE STATISTICS

1. Background Information

International Merchandise Trade

Statistics

The program on international merchandise trade statistics (IMTS) has been implemented by the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) since the early 1990’s and is the pioneer statistical program at the Secretariat. IMTS is a specialized multipurpose domain of official statistics concerned with the provision of data on the movements of goods between countries and areas.  The continued interest in IMTS is due to its crucial role in economic development because such trade binds producers and consumers located in different countries into a global economic system. In this context, availability of timely and high quality trade statistics becomes a precondition for an in-depth analysis of the production, consumption, employment, income and overall welfare at both the country and global level.

IMTS are compiled to serve the needs of many users, including Governments; the business community; compilers of other economic statistics such as balance of payments and national accounts; various regional, supranational and international organizations; researchers and the public at large. Different users need different data, ranging from data sets by country and commodity at varying levels of detail to aggregated figures. The uses of IMTS include:

1. Development of national, regional and international trade policy, including trade
2. negotiations, monitoring trade agreements and settling trade disputes;
3. Establishing general economic policy, including policies on sustainable
4. development, fiscal, monetary, structural and sectoral matters as well as addressing
5. issues of environmental and health concerns;
6. Market analysis to find supply sources or foreign markets and, in combination with
7. structural business statistics, to determine economic characteristics of traders;
8. Establishing supply balances to monitor commodity markets, in particular in such
9. areas as agriculture and energy;
10. Infrastructure planning (harbours, airports, roads etc.);
11. Compilation of transport statistics;
12. Compilation of the import component of the various price indexes (e.g.
13. cost-of-living indexes);
14. Input into and forecasting in the framework of the system of national accounts and balance of payment statistics.

The program is funded by the COMESA regular budget and supplemented by resources from the European Union supported Regional Integration Support Program (RISP). Among the key achievements of the COMESA IMTS program is the compilation, publication and dissemination of the annual bulletin of IMTS for the sub-region and the related statistical capacity building activities both at the secretariat and in member states. The overall objective of the COMESA IMTS program is to ensure that accurate and reliable trade statistics are remitted from member states on a timely and regular basis.  In order to achieve this objective, COMESA Secretariat has installed theEUROTRACE software in almost all the statistical offices of member states and also at some customs administrations.

2. Key Concepts, Definitions and Framework

Concepts and Definitions

Key concepts and definitions adopted for the IMTS cluster are according to the COMESA Rules and Regulations for Compilation of IMTS which are based on the UN’s International Merchandise Trade Statistics Concepts and Definitions (IMTS-2010) that was prepared by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD).

3. Scope and Coverage of Data

Scope

IMTS record all goods which add to or subtract from the stock of material resources by entering (imports) or leaving (exports) the economic territory of a country.

Coverage

All COMESA Member States

4. Data Sources and Methodology used in Data Collection

Data Sources

Data is sourced from Member States National Statistical Offices (NSOs). In some instances, data is sourced from the COMTRADE database in order to fill up gaps for missing countries and as such, due acknowledgement is made to that effect. Data is mainly collected by the customs administrations of member states using customs automated systems such as ASYCUDA and for a few countries, other customs systems, before passing it over to the NSOs for further processing and validation using the EUROTRACE system.