The International Trade and Production Database for Estimation (ITPD-E)

by Ingo Borchert, Mario Larch, Serge Shikher, and Yoto Yotov

Overview

These pages provide a guide to the International Trade and Production Database for Estimation (ITPD-E). The ITPD-E contains consistent data on bilateral international trade and domestic trade, calculated using production data, for a large number of countries, industries, and years. The data are constructed at the industry level covering the broad sectors of agriculture, mining and energy, manufacturing, and services. Therefore, the ITPD-E describes nearly completely the traded sectors of each economy. The ITPD-E covers the time period starting in 2000 and going up to 2016, the most recent year for which data across all sectors are available. The ITPD-E provides information for 243 countries, 170 industries, and 17 years. This includes 26 industries in agriculture, 7 in mining and energy, 120 in manufacturing, and 17 in services.

We envision statistical estimation as the main use of the ITPD-E. Hence, the database consists of the reported administrative (“raw”) data from the sources that we describe in the next section. It includes bilateral trade flows as well as domestic trade. The latter is constructed by using production data, i.e. as the difference between production and total exports. Importantly, since exports are reported on a gross basis, production data are on a gross basis too. In order to ensure maximum coverage, we combine trade data reported by both importer and exporter to fill in as many missing values as possible in the trade and production data. It is important to note that no estimation models, such as the gravity framework, have been used to fill any missing observations in ITPD-E. This is one of the key distinguishing features of ITPD-E that makes it suitable for estimation purposes. Naturally, ITPD-E is not balanced and includes missing observations for some years and countries.

Want more info about the database?

This guide provides the basic information about the ITPD-E. Please see the paper that accompanies the database for a more detailed description of the data, including the description of data sources, concordances, comparisons to existing trade and production datasets, and the application of ITPD-E to the standard gravity model, which serve as a validation of this database a demonstration of its usefulness.

ITPD family of databases

In the future, we plan to produce two additional versions of the database. One will have missing data filled in using the latest methodological advances in structural gravity modeling. This database will constitute the second member of the ITPD family and, due to its suitability for simulations, will be called ITPD-S. A third version within the ITPD family of databases will link the trade flow information to an input-output table (ITPD-IO).