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Where data innovation fulfills global tradeAccess brand-new datasets, real-time insights, and experimental tools to check out today's developing trade landscape Visualization tools based on WTO trade statistics and tariffs Real-time trade insights based upon non-WTO information sources List of freely available non-WTO trade information sources WTO's information partnerships for research functions The Global Trade Data Portal has now been relabelled to "Data Laboratory" to concentrate on data innovation, partnerships, and enhanced access to external information sources.
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On this subject page, you can find information, visualizations, and research on historical and current patterns of international trade, in addition to conversations of their origins and impacts. SectionsAll our deal with Trade & Globalization Among the most crucial advancements of the last century has been the integration of national economies into an international economic system.
One way to see this growth in the information is to track how exports and imports have changed over time. The chart here does this by revealing the volume of world trade given that 1800, adjusting the figures for inflation and indexing them to their 1800 worths. You can switch this chart to a logarithmic scale. This will help you see that, over the long run, development has actually roughly followed a rapid path.
Economic 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 historical sources such as archival customizeds records, early analytical yearbooks, and other main documents. These historical estimates provide us a broad view of how international trade evolved, however they are harder to update, which is why not all charts (and not all series within some charts) reach today.
What these long-run estimates permit us to see is that globalization did not grow along a constant, 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 deals on international economic activity.2 As the chart shows, until 1800, there was an extended period defined by persistently low worldwide trade worldwide the index never went beyond 10% before 1800. Background: trade before the first wave of globalizationBefore globalization took off, trade was driven mostly by colonialism.
Leonor Freire Costa, Nuno Palma, and Jaime Reis, who compiled and released historical price quotes, argue that trade, likewise in this period, had a significant favorable influence on the economy.3 This then changed throughout the 19th century, when technological advances activated a duration of marked growth in world trade the so-called "very first wave of globalization". This very first wave concerned an end with the beginning of World War I, when the decline of liberalism and the rise of nationalism caused a depression in worldwide trade.
After World War II, trade started growing again. This new and continuous wave of globalization has seen worldwide trade grow faster than ever before.
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 practically doubled over the period. This process of European integration then collapsed greatly in the interwar period.
In addition, Western Europe then started to increasingly trade with Asia, the Americas, and, to a smaller level, Africa and Oceania. The next chart, utilizing data from Broadberry and O'Rourke (2010 ), reveals another point of view on the integration of the international economy and plots the advancement of three indicators measuring integration throughout various markets specifically items, labor, and capital markets.4 The signs in this chart are indexed, so they show changes relative to the levels of integration observed in 1900.
26 The worldwide growth of trade after The second world war was mostly possible since of decreases in transaction costs originating from technological advances, such as the development of industrial civil air travel, the enhancement of performance in the merchant marines, and the democratization of the telephone as the main mode of communication.
The very first wave of globalization was characterized by inter-industry trade. In the 2nd wave of globalization, we see an increase in intra-industry trade (i.e., the exchange of broadly similar items and services becoming more common).
The following visualization, from the UN World Development Report (2009 ), plots the fraction of total world trade that is accounted for by intra-industry trade, by type of items. As we can see, intra-industry trade has been increasing for primary, intermediate, and final products. This pattern of trade is necessary because the scope for specialization boosts if countries can exchange intermediate goods (e.g., automobile parts) for associated last goods (e.g., cars and trucks). Share of intraindustry trade by type of products Figure 6.1 in UN World Advancement Report (2009 ) After examining the worldwide trends behind the very first and second waves of globalization, we can take a look at how these patterns played out within specific nations.
Economic Trends for 2026 and the Global OverviewYou can modify the nations and regions selected; each country tells a various story.7 The exact same historic sources also enable us to explore where countries sent their exports over time. This breakdown by location offers a complementary view of globalization: not only did nations incorporate at various moments, but the partners they traded with also altered in different ways.
These figures are obtained from modern trade records, customs data, and international databases. With this data, we can track present patterns in trade volumes, trade composition, and trading partners.
International trade is much smaller relative to the domestic economy in the US than in practically all European countries. This is partly described by the large volume of trade that takes location within the European Union. If you push the play button on the map, you can see how trade openness has changed over time throughout all countries.
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