OECD TRADE INDICATORS

PROJECT

Statistical analysis of international

trade and production:
towards a scoreboard of indicators
Lelio Iapadre (University of LAquila and
National Institute for Foreign Trade, Italy)
Alessia Proietti (National Institute for Foreign Trade, Italy)

Background

The OECD Handbook on Economic Globalisation Indicators

(HEGI)

The Trade Indicators Project (TIP): a survey of statistical

indicators on international trade and production

The concept of economic globalisation and its measurement

Foreign direct investment
The economic activity of multinational enterprises
The internationalisation of technology
Aspects of trade globalisation
International integration
Policy restrictiveness
Performance and competitiveness
Structural indicators
Structural decomposition techniques

Enterprise-related data

OECD Statistics on Enterprises by Size Class (SEC)

Eurostat pilot project on enterprise-related trade data

Targets

Identifying a limited set of statistical

indicators, based on their analytical and
policy relevance
Developing enterprise-related indicators,
based on linkages between the existing
statistical registers and databases on
business international activities
Publishing a new statistical product on
international trade and production

TIP products in 2003

A taxonomy of statistical
indicators for the analysis of
international trade and production
A review of trade policy indicators
New indicators for the analysis of
intra-regional trade

The Scoreboard on
Economic Globalisation

A final target and a framework for

on-going projects
Co-ordination between different
projects (HEGI, TIP, SEC) and
OECD departments
Co-operation with other
institutions and research centres

Some examples:
international performance
and competitiveness

The taxonomy:
indicators

Net trade indicators

Market shares
Price indicators
Composite indicators

Net trade performance

indicators

The normalized trade balance

Z = (X M) / (X + M)
1Z1
where:
X = exports
M = imports

Market shares

The share of OECD exports

Si = X i / i X i
0 Si 1
where:
Xi = exports of
country i
i = 1 n OECD members

Competitiveness
indicators

The real effective exchange rate

q = E P / P*
where:
E = nominal effective exchange rate
(foreign currency per unit of domestic
currency)
P = index of domestic prices
P* = index of foreign prices

Some examples:
structural indicators

The taxonomy
Single-flow indicators of trade intensity
and specialization
Net-trade indicators of specialization
Inter/Intra-industry trade intensity
Intra-firm trade indicators
Measures of similarity
Measures of concentration and
diversification

Single-flow indicators of
trade intensity and
specialization

The symmetric revealed

comparative advantage index
SRCAik = (RCAik 1) / (RCAik + 1)
RCAik = (xik / k xik) / (xwk / k xwk)

where:
xik = country is exports of product k
xwk = world exports of product k

Net trade indicators of

specialization

The normalized share balance

NSBik = [(xik / k xik) - (mik / k mik)] /
[(xik / k xik) + (mik / k mik)]
- 1 NSBik 1
where:
xik = country is exports of product k
mik = country is imports of product k

The Grubel-Lloyd index of

intra-industry trade
xijk mijk xijk mijk
n

xijk mijk
GLijk 1
xijk mijk

GLij k 1

k 1

xijk mijk
n

k 1

Definition of intra-industry trade:

balanced two-way trade in goods
produced by the same industry
Inspiration: studies on trade bilateralism
in the Thirties
Relation with measures of similarity

The Vona index of

intra-industry trade
xijk mijk
m

V ij k n1
xijk mijk
k 1

Definition of intra-industry trade:

two-way flows of goods
produced by the same industry,
independently of their balance
The CEPII approach: the overlap
threshold

Measures of similarity

The Finger-Kreinin index of

similarity between trade
distributions
FKij = 1 [ k |(xik / k xik) - (xjk / k
xjk)|]
where:
xik = country is exports of product k
xjk = country js exports of product k

Measures of
concentration

The Herfindahl index of export

concentration by product
Hi = x x
where:
xik = country is exports of product k
2

ik

ik

The need for

enterprise-related
statistics
A clear understanding of

phenomena such as intra-firm

trade and international
production networks requires
enterprise-related data
Available statistical sources
The AFA and FATS databases
Enterprise-related trade statistics

Italian exports value

by enterprise size 2001

Italian exporting firms

by number of markets
- 2001

Conclusions

Main features of the Scoreboard on

Economic Globalization
An integrated analysis of international
trade and production
Emphasis on enterprise-related data
A user-friendly tool, giving access to a wide
range of different data-bases
A laboratory for new data production
techniques, based on linkages between
different archives