Intra-African trade information

[bill-anderson]

Promoting (through data) the development of the African Continental Free Trade Area is a key new priority in the Africa Hub Strategy. We need to do a thorough landscaping exercise to understand what data already exists, where the gaps lie and where DI might find its USP.

A lot of trade data already exists but digestable information appears to be scarce. I have searched for easy to use information on inter-country trade and drawn a blank. Hence this relatively simple idea: to create an interactive Sankey diagram (or similar) displaying annual imports ane exports of commodities and services between countries. Something a bit more sophisticated than this.

A basic Sankey would require a table containing the following fields:

• Reporting Country
• Partner Country
• Type of Flow (Import/Export)
• Commodity or Service
• Year
• Quantity
• Unit of Measure
• Value

This data is available from the UN Comtrade Database via its API . NB that there is free access to the database BUT with a limit of returning 100,000 rows per query THOUGH no limit on the number of queries you can make.

Here is a download of Uganda exports to Kenya between 2018 and 2021
UGA-KE Export 2018-21.xlsx

Relevant columns mapped to the above fields are:

• Reporting Country << Reporter ISO
• Partner Country << Partner ISO
• Type of Flow (Import/Export) << Trade Flow Code *
• Commodity or Service << Commodity Code + Aggregate Level **
• Year << Year
• Quantity << Qty
• Unit of Measure << Qty Unit
• Value << Trade Value (US$)

'* This needs investigating as the code showing in the sample download is 0 but it should be displaying 2 for export.
'* * Commodity Codes exist for various levels of aggregation. (eg Aggregate level 2 maps to Commodity Code 1 [animals] while Aggrgate level 4 maps to Commodity Code 102 [bovine animals; live] etc. You can't add up across aggregation levels.

Other considerations:

1. As an AU initiative we need to do all African countries, not just Sub-Saharan
2. Kenya will report its exports to Uganda and Uganda will report its imports from Kenya. I am not currently clear how one resolves these two datasets
3. The database is updated 8 times a day, and monthly data is also available. This does not mean the data is up to date. In the sample download there is no 2021 data despit it having been part of the query.
4. There are other data sources - such as the World Bank's World Integrated Trade Solution. I haven't explored them yet.

[bill-anderson]

Comtrade goods and services classifications
Comtrade classification.xlsx