Missing trade flow vs. zero trade flow

[tommaso...@gmail.com]

Hello all,

I am using UN Comtrade Trade data for the United States where USA is the reporter, HS1988/92 is the native nomenclature and SIC is the derived nomenclature.

The short version of my question is: how can I distinguish missing data on a trade flow from a zero trade flow?

To elaborate, consider the following case. Suppose that WITS contains import data from the World into U.S. for SIC industry j in 2000. Now also suppose that, for the same industry and year, WITS does not contain import data from country i into U.S. May I assume that, for industry j in 2000, imports from country i in U.S. were zero? Or the absence of data could be due to missing data?

Can I make the same assumption for exports (just change "export" for "import" in my question above)?

Thanks!

PS: Notice that I know that trade data is not available for all SIC industries (just count the number of SIC industries each year with trade data and you'll see that they are far less than all the available SIC codes for goods industries). That is why in my example above I assumed that there is trade data for the World because that means that there are some HS1988/92 which map to that SIC industry and so the absence of import data for country i cannot be due to concordance issues.

[Samuel Munyaneza]

Hello,

If we trust the data (what we should do) as reported  by the country in this case USA and if  you have verified that there is no trade under HS1988/92 (therefore not a concordance issue)  then this means  there was no trade between county i and the USA in 2000 for industry j.
 
Best regards,

Sam

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