Description :

The International Trade Statistics (ITS) report, published annually every November, is one of the WTO's flagship publications, providing comprehensive, comparable and up-to-date statistics on trade in merchandise and commercial services for an assessment of world trade flows by country, region and main product groups or service categories. The 2006 report was downloaded more than 63 000 times, thus, ranking 4th in the list of downloads from WTO's website – a proof of its high reputation for providing authoritative statistics on international trade.

Some 250 tables and charts depict trade developments from various perspectives and provide a number of long-term time series. Major trade developments are summarized and discussed in the first part of the report under Overview. Detailed trade statistics are provided in Appendix tables. This volume has been produced by a team of statisticians from the Statistics Division in collaboration with the Development and Economic Research Division.

Changes in underlying economic structures, improved data availability, and new technologies have, however, resulted in a desire to redesign the ITS for a number of reasons:

• to strengthen the complementarities between the "paper" publication and the electronic format;
• present trends and data in their global context;
• to take account of an increased availability of trade in services statistics.

The ITS chapters will now be introduced by more “visual highlights” using "story-telling" tables and charts to illustrate trade developments. The new layout will offer more flexibility to guide the user in his/her reading through highlighted messages, including boxes or reference material to point out so-called metadata, that is, explanations to the data in form of definitions, methodologies, etc. It will be possible to integrate maps, charts and tables for a more attractive presentation. These highlights will then be followed by "value-added" analytical tables, but with a more modernized and "enhanced" look.

The new ITS will include more detailed information on trade in services statistics. In addition to the three categories published so far (transportation, travel, other commercial services), the report will also present statistics on individual components such as communication, insurance, and financial services, for world trade as well as bilateral trade. Selected leading traders of each component will be shown. The report will also include statistics on foreign affiliate trade in services statistics (FATS), a new domain that has been gaining increasing relevance with the accumulated flow of foreign direct investment.

Published November 2007| 262 pages | 297 x 210 mm | Weight: 0.750 kg

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Net price : 50.00 CHF

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