8 minute readGovernment deficit is a key indicator that attracts a lot of policy interest. It reflects when the fiscal balance – also referred to as net lending minus net borrowing – is negative. This article outlines how government total revenue and expenditure are calculated and how the fiscal balance is derived, and it explains why analysts have a particular interest in cases where governments run a deficit.
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5 minute readImport duties – commonly referred to as tariffs – are charges levied on certain goods when they enter an economic territory. The 2008 System of National Accounts explains that they may be intended as a means of raising government revenues and/or protecting domestic industries by discouraging imports.
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5 minute readIn 2024, global trade in goods – including agricultural products, energy, electronics, and more – exceeded 24 trillion USD. At the same time, global trade in services – including transport, travel, legal, advertising, and more – grew to 8.7 trillion USD. In this truly interconnected world, where goods are manufactured using materials and components from across the globe, and services can be digitally ordered and/or delivered, understanding international trade statistics is more important than ever.
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4 minute readServices play an increasingly important role in international trade. In 2023, services trade accounted for approximately one quarter of global trade, up from one fifth a decade earlier. Explore how the refreshed OECD-WTO Balanced Trade in Services (BaTIS) dataset unveils nuanced patterns in global services trade. This new release offers richer details and improved consistency, enabling policymakers and analysts to pinpoint shifts across diverse sectors—from finance to digital services. By capturing bilateral flows at a finer level, BaTIS supports better monitoring of emerging trends, highlights competitive strengths, and informs strategic decisions in international trade.
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4 minute readMultinational Enterprises (MNEs) are key actors in the global economy. In 2023, the top 500 MNEs generated over USD 21 trillion in revenues, greater than the combined GDP of the European Union. To overcome this, the OECD and United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) developed the Multinational Enterprise Information Platform (MEIP). The Platform is updated annually, with the third release, covering the period to 31st December 2023, now available.
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5 minute readTo understand international trade and set policy direction it is vital to understand the costs associated with transporting and insuring goods across borders. International transport and insurance costs, which correspond to the value of the transport and insurance services performed to deliver the goods from the border of the exporting country to the border of the importing country, have a direct and material impact on trade patterns and on a country’s competitiveness. Despite their importance, accessing quantitative information on these costs has long been a challenge for statisticians and policymakers alike. This article presents the OECD International Transport and Insurance Costs of merchandise trade (ITIC) database (Fiallos, Liberatore, & Cassimon, 2024), which helps to deepen our understanding of these aspects of global trade by providing both reported data and estimates on international transport and insurance costs on over 200 economies by partner and product.
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4 minute readRising uncertainties and geo-political tensions, together with more complex trade relations have increased the demand for data and tools to monitor global trade in a timely manner. At the same time, advances in Big Data Analytics and access to a huge quantity of alternative data – outside the realm of official statistics – have opened new avenues to monitor trade. These data can help identify bottlenecks and disruptions in real time but need to be cleaned and validated.
New work from the OECD Statistics and Data Directorate proposes a new methodology to identify ports, at a higher level of precision than in past research; builds indicators to monitor port congestion and trends in maritime trade flows; and provides a new Dashboard to get detailed information and better understand those flows.
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8 minute readGetting timely information on global value chains is of key interest to policymaking, given the renewed interest in their resilience since the COVID-19 crisis. This article updates nowcasts of selected TiVA indicators for 2021-23 for 41 countries (36 OECD countries and Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, South Africa) and 24 industries, building on the OECD TiVA database, most recent data on balance of payments, national accounts and short-term indicators of the business cycles.
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