5 things you should know about international trade statistics

Put simply, a trade balance is the difference between an economy’s exports and its imports over a given period. When exports are higher than imports, we see a trade surplus. When the opposite is true, i.e. when the value of imports exceeds the value of exports, then a trade deficit is recorded.

When someone thinks about international trade, chances are they’re thinking about cross‑border trade in goods. According to recent WTO estimates¹, goods worth over USD 24 trillion crossed at least one international border in 2024. These goods include agricultural products, raw materials, energy, and a broad range of manufactured goods such as machinery, transport equipment, electronics, and much more.

Cross‑border trade in goods statistics are available at a high level of detail, so exports, imports and balances can be analysed for specific commodities between individual trading partners. Indeed, bilateral trade balances can look very different than the total balance of a country with the rest of the world, which is derived by aggregating the figures across all commodities and partners.

Of course, goods are only one component of international trade; services also play a crucial role. But before talking about services, let’s dig deeper into some important methodological concepts.

International trade in goods is measured in two different (and complementary) ways:

• international merchandise trade statistics (IMTS), or trade in goods on a cross-border basis, track all goods crossing an international border; and
• trade in goods as measured in the Balance of Payments (BOP), which tracks all goods changing ownership between residents and non-residents of an economy.

Cross-border trade in goods statistics cannot directly be linked to other macroeconomic aggregates (for instance, GDP).  On the other hand, the BOP summarises all economic transactions of an economy with the rest of the world. It is part of (and consistent with) the broader integrated economic accounts. As such, exports and imports as measured by the BOP on a change of ownership basis are directly linked with the rest of the macroeconomic aggregates (including GDP).

As trade in goods can be measured in two different ways, so can trade in goods balances (Figure 1). While the two measures are similar at the aggregate level for many countries, data users should keep in mind that they may differ, as commodities (another term for goods) can change ownership without crossing borders, or cross borders without changing ownership. This is more and more common as production networks become increasingly complex.

(There are other differences between BOP and IMTS, but we’ll leave the more detailed explanations to the manuals²).

Good news! Services transactions are also part of the BOP statistical framework and are measured consistently with trade in goods on a change of ownership basis (consistently meaning they don’t overlap and can be summed).

Global trade in services reached nearly USD 8.7 trillion in 2024 (according to WTO estimates). While levels remain lower than for goods, services trade has been growing at a faster pace than goods trade in recent years. This is primarily because many services can now be delivered digitally, allowing them to ‘cross’ international borders much like physical goods do. In fact, services trade covers a broad range of products, from ‘physical’ services such as transport, travel and construction, to more ‘intangible’ services like consulting, legal, engineering, architectural services and advertising, and services related to intellectual property such as software and audiovisuals.

But how can all these flows be measured accurately? Tracking the provision of streaming services or the supply of online advertising is certainly more challenging than counting boxes of oranges at customs. However, long gone are the days of services being dubbed ‘invisibles’! Using a variety of sources (including surveys, payments data, and administrative sources), statisticians pay as much attention to accurately recording the flows of intangible services as they do to tracking the trade of physical goods.

Once exports and imports of services are compiled, the services trade balance can be computed, and (unsurprisingly) it provides quite a different view than the trade in goods balance (Figure 2).

Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed that aggregating the goods balance (on a change of ownership basis) and the services balance will not result in a ‘balanced balance’. This is because the balance of payments covers all transactions between residents and non-residents of an economy, not just trade in goods and services.

International transactions also involve flows of income (such as wages of border workers, dividends from oversee investments, and more) which residents of an economy earn from or pay to the rest of the world. These constitute the primary and secondary income balances, which together with the goods and services balances make up the current account balance.

But that’s not all. Capital transfers, covering for instance (but not only) payments businesses make to acquire brand names, copyrights and trademarks, have their own balance as well.

The sum of the current and capital account balances shows whether an economy is lending (surplus) or borrowing (deficit) from the rest of the world. The financial account, the final BOP component, records all financial flows (such as foreign direct investment and portfolio investment), into or out of the reporting economy, showing how the surplus (or deficit) in the current and capital accounts are financed.

In other words, the balance of the financial account is, errors and omissions apart, equivalent to the sum of the current and capital account balances, which is how the balance of payments got its name.

Digital trade is defined as all international trade that is digitally ordered and/or digitally delivered. Both goods and services can be digitally ordered, for instance via an e-commerce website or a digital intermediation platform, by individual consumers as well as businesses of any size. But only services can be digitally delivered, and this has contributed to the significant growth of overall trade in services in the past decade. Indeed, if they couldn’t be digitally delivered, many services wouldn’t be traded at all!

As digital trade is a subset of total international trade, all measurement rules (or accounting principles, as statisticians say) applicable to international trade also apply to digital trade. While digital trade transactions are fully included in the existing measurement frameworks, they cannot be (in general) separately identified. This ‘invisibility’ may contribute to the common but false perception that digital trade is entirely unaccounted for in official statistics.

Despite the potential measurement errors (inherent in any statistics), digital trade does not go unrecorded. Statistical compilers are aware of the additional measurement challenges posed by digitalisation and are adapting their surveys and exploring new data sources to ensure the measurements are as accurate as possible, while working to separately identify digitally ordered and digitally delivered transactions³.

So, even if not separately shown, digital trade is covered by the measures discussed above, and contributes to the observed trade in goods and services balances. 

1. WTO (2025), Global Trade Outlook and Statistics 2025, World Trade Organization, Geneva, https://www.wto.org/english/res_e/booksp_e/trade_outlook25_e.pdf.
2. United Nations (2011), International Merchandise Trade Statistics: Concepts and Definitions 2010, Statistical Papers, Series M No. 52, Rev. 3, United Nations Publications, New York, https://unstats.un.org/unsd/trade/eg-imts/IMTS%202010%20(English).pdf.
   IMF (2009), Balance of Payments and International Investment Position Manual, Sixth Edition (BPM6), International Monetary Fund, Washington, D.C., https://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/bop/2007/bopman6.htm.
3. IMF/OECD/UNCTAD/WTO (2023), Handbook on Measuring Digital Trade: Second Edition, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/2023/07/handbook-on-measuring-digital-trade-second-edition_099afd2f.html.