Treating trade statistics inaccuracies: the case of intra-industry trade

Abstract

We investigate the accuracy of trade statistics employing intra-industry trade analysis for 29 countries. We exploit the fact that country A's exports to country B are country B's imports from country A. The data published by the two sides can be compared with each other. Are A's or B's data more accurate? Our analysis is based on the average degree of ‘similarity’ between country A's and country B's data and the ‘mirror’ data of all the other countries in the sample. The ranking of the countries by the accuracy of their data yielded by our calculations mainly confirm our a priori expectations. We also investigate whether the data of ‘good’ reporting countries can be more trusted than some averages of the latter and the data reported by the ‘bad’ reporters.