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world · structural change
World trade, 1995-2024 and the long view
How has world merchandise trade evolved in the BACI era, and what structural shifts has it been through? Eight figures: the level of world exports, the trade-to-GDP ratio, the sectoral composition, the concentration of exporters, the top-15 league table, growth dispersion 2019-2024, the thick-edge network of bilateral flows and the ranked bar view of the top-20 corridors, and a 200-year frame that puts the last three decades in historical perspective.
world exports 2024$22.83T
CAGR 1995-20245.3%
trade/GDP 202456.8%
exporter HHI 20240.048
countries ranked226
Figure 1
World merchandise exports, 1995–2024
Summing country exports across all 226 BACI reporters, world merchandise trade rose from $5.07T in 1995 to $22.83T in 2024, a nominal-USD CAGR of 5.3% (deflating by the World Bank world GDP deflator roughly halves this growth rate; the chart below is current USD, not price-adjusted). Three contractions are visible as dips: the 2001 dot-com slowdown ($6.52T → $6.33T, -3.0%), the 2008-09 Great Trade Collapse ($16.13T → $12.45T, -22.8%), and the COVID shock of 2020 ($18.57T → $17.18T, -7.5%). The 2008-09 episode is the largest peacetime trade collapse on record; see Baldwin (2009) 'The Great Trade Collapse' and Bems, Johnson & Yi (2013, Annu. Rev. Econ.) on the role of vertical supply chains in amplifying the shock.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28), summed f.o.b. exports across all reporter countries. Values are nominal (current USD), not deflated.
The globalization ratio
The ratio of trade (exports plus imports) to GDP is the canonical single-number measure of how globalized the world economy is. Subramanian & Kessler (2013, PIIE WP 13-6) named the 1990s-2010s run-up 'hyperglobalization' and dated its plateau to the aftermath of 2008-09.
Figure 2
World trade-to-GDP ratio, 1990–2024
World trade/GDP climbed from 38% in 1990 to a peak of 62% in 2022 and stood at 57% in 2024. The series is consistent with the 'slowbalization' thesis of Irwin (2020) and IMF (2023, WEO Ch. 4): the hyperglobalization engine that lifted the ratio by roughly 24 pp stalled after the global financial crisis, though the level remains historically unprecedented.
Source: World Bank World Development Indicators, NE.TRD.GNFS.ZS, aggregate WLD. Trade = exports + imports of goods & services.
What the world trades
Structural composition of world exports at the HS section level (goods only; note that Fig 2's WDI trade/GDP ratio covers goods + services). The twenty-one HS sections bundle the 5,022 six-digit product lines into coherent groups: machinery & electronics (section 16), mineral fuels (section 5), chemicals (6), vehicles (17), and base metals (15). Schott (2008,Economic Policy) documents within-product unit-value dispersion along the developing-country export rise; the chart below captures the coarser across-section picture.
Figure 3
Top-5 HS sections of world exports, share of total, 1995–2024
How concentrated are exporters?
The Herfindahl-Hirschman index across the 226 exporters answers whether the gains from three decades of globalization were diffuse or concentrated. Krugman's new trade theory (1980 QJE; 2009 Nobel lecture in AER 99(3)) and Melitz's (2003, Econometrica) 'new new' firm-heterogeneity framework jointly predict that, with scale economies and selection, liberalization can raise the dispersion of country market shares; Hanson (2012, JEP) documents China's outsized role in that reshuffling.
Figure 4
World exporter concentration (HHI across 226 countries), 1995–2024
Exporter HHI moved from 0.050 in 1995(equivalent to about 20 equally-sized exporters) to 0.048 in 2024 (about 21 equivalent exporters). The world has become modestly less concentrated, as middle-income exporters gained share.HHI is computed on country market shares, not firm shares.
Method: HHI = Σ sᵢ² where sᵢ is country i's share of world exports that year. Hirschman (1945) National Power and the Structure of Foreign Trade; Herfindahl (1950). Computed inline from BACI country_year_totals.
Who actually moves the goods
The HHI in Figure 4 is a scalar; the underlying league table is where the story lives. Fifteen countries account for roughly 60.6% of total world merchandise exports in 2024. That concentration is not a statistical artefact. It is the working geography of modern trade, and it is the set of reporters who define the HHI, the sectoral shares, and most of the bilateral flows on the rest of this site.
Figure 5
Top-15 merchandise exporters in 2024 (current USD, BACI)
Who grew, who shrank: 2019-2024 export growth
The level view in Figure 5 is a snapshot; the next question is who is accelerating and who is stalling. The five-year window 2019-2024 spans the COVID trade collapse, the 2021-22 rebound, the Russia-Ukraine commodity shock, and the US-China tariff rounds. Because it brackets a full supply-chain dislocation and recovery, it separates structural winners from countries whose terms of trade moved against them. We compute cumulative nominal-USD export growth for every reporter with at least USD 100M of exports in both years, then split the sample at the cross-country median.
Figure 5b
Export growth dispersion, 2019-2024 (top-5 above-median and bottom-5 below-median)
The network behind the league table
The top-15 reporters in Figure 5 do not trade in isolation; most of their volume is carried on a few thick corridors. The figure below plots the top-30 country pairs by flow in 2024as a directed network over country centroids. Edge thickness is proportional to the bilateral value; thicker edges carry more trade. This is the 'core plumbing' view that Antràs (2020, JIE) calls the backbone of the global production network.
Figure 6
Global trade flow network: top-30 country pairs by flow, 2024
Top partners by flow
The network view in Figure 6 shows geography and clustering; the ranked bar view below shows how mucheach of the top-20 bilateral corridors actually carries. The top pair alone is typically larger than the 20th by more than an order of magnitude, which is the fat-tail that makes aggregate trade metrics so sensitive to a small number of relationships. Head & Mayer (2014, Handbook of International Economics) call this the 'distance-weighted mass' concentration that any gravity estimate has to fit.
Figure 6b
Top-20 bilateral corridors by flow, 2024
How concentrated is each big exporter's basket?
Figure 4 measures concentration across countries (one HHI per year on country market shares). The complementary read is concentration withineach leader's basket: an HHI computed across HS6 product shares of that country's own export portfolio. The two HHIs do not have to move together: the world can stay diffuse across countries while individual baskets concentrate (commodity-dependence) or diversify (machinery upgrading). The contrast separates broad manufacturers from single-product commodity exporters in the same league table. Hesse (2008, World Bank Growth Commission WP 21) and Lederman & Maloney (2007, Natural Resources, Neither Curse nor Destiny) both flag within-basket HHI as the cleaner first-pass measure of export-base brittleness.
Figure 6c
Within-basket export HHI across HS6 products, top-15 exporters in 2024
The 200-year frame
The BACI window starts in 1995, but the question of whether today is exceptionally globalized only makes sense against the long sweep. TRADHIST (Fouquin & Hugot 2016, CEPII) reconstructs bilateral trade and macro aggregates for 88-147 countries from 1827 to 2014. Two globalization peaks emerge: the Pax Britannica era before 1914 and the post-1980 hyperglobalization. O'Rourke & Williamson (1999) Globalization and History and Findlay & O'Rourke (2007) Power and Plenty are the standard references for interpreting these arcs.
Seven pictures, one reading. World merchandise trade rose from $5.07T in 1995 to $22.83T in 2024in current USD; the globalization ratio plateaued after 2008 but the level remains historically unprecedented on the TRADHIST frame; composition shifted toward machinery & electronics and away from raw commodities over thirty years; the concentration index barely moved despite China's rise, because China replaced mass in a tail that was already long. For country-level detail, see /country/<iso3>; for product detail, /product/<hs6>; for near-real-time reads, /monthly.
Machinery & electronics (section 16) moved from 27.8% of world exports in 1995 to 27.3% in 2024. Mineral fuels (section 5) went from 8.0% to 15.0%; the spike after 2003 traces the 2000s commodity super-cycle (Erten & Ocampo 2013, World Development). The figure plots shares to isolate composition from level.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28) joined to HS92 section codes. Shares sum to 100% across all 21 sections each year; only the latest year's top-5 are plotted.
China leads with $3.59T, followed by USA at $1.86T and Germany at $1.51T. Together the top-15 reporters sum to $13.84T, or 60.6% of world exports. Four of the fifteen are East / Southeast Asian; six are European; North America contributes three (USA, Mexico, Canada); India and Other-Asia-nes round out the list. The rest-of-world tail below the top-15 covers roughly 39.4% of world exports across the remaining 200-plus reporters. This tail is where small-country export diversification lives.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28), summed f.o.b. exports by reporter (× 1000 to convert from thousands USD to USD). ISO3 upper-cased and deduplicated against countries.parquet before join.
Across 189 reporters with material exports in both endpoints, the cross-country median growth was +20.3% over the five years. 94 countries grew faster than the median and 95 slower. The fastest grower on the chart is Guyana at +1232.5%; the steepest decline is Mali at -82.2%. Commodity-exporter swings drive both tails: rising hydrocarbon and metals prices lift resource economies after 2021, while countries stranded by sanctions or capacity collapses show the sharpest declines. The median (20.3%) is the honest benchmark for whether a country's headline number reflects structural gain or mere commodity-price carry.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28), country_year_totals. Growth = (exports_${latestYear} / exports_2019 - 1) in current USD. Sample restricted to reporters with > USD 100M exports in both endpoints to suppress small-base noise.
The thirty thickest bilateral corridors in 2024 sum to $5.17T, or roughly 22.6% of world merchandise exports. The heaviest single edge is MEX → USA at $491.3B. Three nodes (USA, CHN, DEU) account for the bulk of the endpoints; North American, East Asian, and European clusters each show internal triangles. Rest-of-world pairs fall below the cut entirely, which is itself the point.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28) bilateral_year partition for the latest year, summed over all HS6 products, ISO3-harmonised. Node positions from country centroids (public/data/country-centroids.json); edge width scaled to flow.
The twenty thickest corridors in 2024 sum to $4.14T, roughly 18.1% of world merchandise exports. The heaviest single edge (MEX → USA, $491.3B) is about 4.0× the 20th-ranked corridor (CHN → IND, $122.3B). This is the fat tail the network figure hides: reading the shape of the ranked bars is the cleanest way to see it.
Source: CEPII BACI 202501 (retrieved 2026-04-28) bilateral_year partition for the latest year, summed over all HS6 products, × 1000 to convert thousands USD to USD. ISO3 upper-cased and deduplicated before join.
The most concentrated basket among the top-15 is Chinese Taipei (S19) at HHI = 0.176 across 4,339 HS6 lines, the tell-tale signature of a commodity-anchored export portfolio. The most diversified is Italy (ITA) at HHI = 0.006 across 4,558 lines. Two countries can carry similar dollar volumes (Figure 5) and sit on opposite ends of this chart, which is the point: the basket-shape information is orthogonal to the basket- size information.
Method: HHI = Σ sᵢ² where sᵢ is HS6 product i's share of that country's total exports in the latest year. BACI export_value × 1000 for USD; ISO3 upper-cased. Hirschman (1945)/Herfindahl (1950); Hesse (2008) Growth Commission WP 21; Lederman & Maloney (2007) Natural Resources, Neither Curse nor Destiny.
This series is not a world trade/GDP ratio in the WDI sense. It is the cross-country average of a gravity-like bilateral-trade-over-GDPo×GDPd quantity, so the units are not directly comparable to Figure 2. Read patterns, not levels. The series rises to 38.3% by 1913, falls to 12.8% by 1945 under two world wars and autarky, and recovers to 21.1% in 2000 (sample peak 48.0% in 1869). Because the country panel grows from 88 reporters in 1827 to 147 by 2014, year-to-year comparisons across the full span are subject to coverage drift; O'Rourke & Williamson (1999) and Findlay & O'Rourke (2007) remain the standard references for interpreting the two peaks.
Source: CEPII TRADHIST (Fouquin & Hugot 2016). Series is the cross-country average of bilateral trade / (GDP_o × GDP_d), a gravity-like openness proxy, not a conventional trade/GDP ratio. Coverage drifts from 88 countries (1827) to 147 (2014); treat pre-1870 levels as indicative only.