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monthly · UN Comtrade
What does trade look like beyond the BACI lag?
CEPII BACI reconciles reporter and partner filings into a clean bilateral panel, but that reconciliation imposes a roughly two-year publication lag: as of this page's last rebuild the newest BACI year is 2024. UN Comtrade publishes monthly reporter-side filings with a two-to-three-month lag, so monthly Comtrade is the only near-real-time window on global trade. This page uses 30 of the largest reporters (partner = World, HS6) to sketch what has happened since BACI went cold.
last update2025-12
reporters25
rows6,951,108
period range2023-01 to 2025-12
BACI·Comtrade log-r (2023)0.828
Note. Last update: 2025-12. Source: UN Comtrade v1 API, HS classification, partnerCode = 0 (World). This page complements, it does not replace, BACI: Comtrade is reporter-side and unreconciled (mirror discrepancies between importer and exporter filings are unresolved), while BACI applies the Gaulier-Zignago (2010) harmonisation. When the two disagree at the country level, that gap is a measurement artefact, not a trade fact.
Figure 1
World monthly trade, last 24 months through 2025-12
Sum of exports (flowCode = X) and imports (flowCode = M) across the 30 reporters below, each reported against partner = World. The two series should roughly mirror each other in aggregate; the residual is the classical CIF-FOB wedge plus the bilateral gap that BACI would later reconcile. Strong seasonality (China's Lunar-New-Year trough in January-February, Western year-end peaks in November-December) is visible in the raw monthly print.
Source: UN Comtrade v1, HS classification, partner=World, 30 largest reporters.
Who is accelerating, who is decelerating
Indexing each reporter's monthly exports to a value of 100 at the same month one year ago strips out level differences and makes relative momentum readable. Lines above 100 are reporters exporting more (in current USD) than a year earlier; lines below 100 are in retreat. This is the same normalisation Baldwin & Freeman (2022) recommend for near-real-time trade monitoring during shocks, because it de-emphasises stable structural differences.
Figure 2
Top-10 reporters, monthly exports indexed to 2024-12 = 100
Latest month snapshot
A cross-sectional bar chart of total reported exports for the most recent month we have. Coverage is uneven: some reporters lag by three months, some by one; where a reporter has not yet filed for 2025-12 its bar is simply missing. This is expected, one of the signals in the snapshot is which reporters file quickly.
Figure 3
Reporter exports in 2025-10, partner = World
United States (USA) leads the snapshot with $202.6B in exports in 2025-10. Top-15 reporters filing on time sum to $566.4B.
Legitimacy check: do BACI and Comtrade agree?
BACI is derived from the same Comtrade raw filings but applies a reconciliation algorithm (Gaulier & Zignago, 2010) that reweights importer and exporter reports by reliability and converts CIF values to FOB. A log-log scatter of annualised Comtrade exports (2023) against BACI exports for the same year-country lets us see the gap. Points on the 45-degree line mean the two sources agree; points above the line mean Comtrade reports higher exports than BACI finally settled on (typically because the reporter over-states re-exports or applies the CIF-FOB adjustment differently).
Figure 4
BACI 2023 exports vs Comtrade 2023 annualised, by reporter
Who is growing fastest, right now
Monthly year-on-year growth rates strip out level differences and let us rank reporters on momentum alone. The same snapshot month as Figure 3 is used for the numerator; the denominator is each reporter's exports exactly twelve months earlier. Positive bars are reporters growing in current USD year-on-year; negative bars are in retreat. The median across the sample is a proxy for the global pulse without the base-effect distortion that raw level charts carry.
Figure 5
Year-on-year export growth in 2025-10, top-15 reporters
Median year-on-year growth across the top-15 filers in 2025-10 is +10.0%. Bars are ranked by absolute export value in the snapshot month, not by growth rate, so the top of the chart shows the world's largest reporters and their current momentum side by side. Reporters are dropped if they did not file twelve months earlier, so a short list is informative, not anomalous.
Citations
Baldwin, R., & Freeman, R. (2022). Risks and global supply chains: what we know and what we need to know. Annual Review of Economics, 14, 153-180.
CEPII (2024). BACI: International Trade Database at the Product-Level (1994-2024 release). Gaulier, G., & Zignago, S. (2010). CEPII Working Paper 2010-23.
United Nations Statistics Division (2024). UN Comtrade Database, Trade Data API v1. https://comtradeplus.un.org.
Bridging BACI's two-year lag with Comtrade monthly data gives us a picture accurate to roughly the last quarter. The page should be read as a lead indicator: when the monthly reporter-side series start moving, BACI will eventually follow, but the reconciliation can change the level by a few percent per country, and occasionally the sign of a bilateral flow. For research that requires reconciled bilateral data, wait for BACI; for current awareness, read this page.
Ten largest reporters by cumulative exports over the sample. Values express each reporter's export receipts in a given month as a percent of its receipts exactly twelve months earlier. Values near 100 are flat; 110 is up ten percent year-on-year.
Source: UN Comtrade v1, monthly HS6 aggregated, partner=World.
Each dot is one reporter that filed at least ten monthly returns in 2023(partial filers are dropped so the annual totals are comparable). Axes are log-USD. The log-correlation across the sample is 0.828, consistent with the finding that the two sources measure the same underlying trade but differ at the country level because BACI reconciles CIF-FOB and mirror-report gaps.
Source: UN Comtrade v1 (monthly, aggregated to 2023) and CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28), overlap year 2023, values in current USD.
Source: UN Comtrade v1, partnerCode = 0, flowCode = X, 2025-10 vs same month prior year.