What are the trends in the international trade since 2010 and the most traded commodities?

The historical record indicates that, international trade has grown remarkably in the last couple of centuries. After a long period of slow growth and of up and down cycles after the Second World War, international trade started growing again, and in the last decades trade development has been faster than any previous time in history. “Today, the sum of exports and imports across nations is higher than 50% of global production. At the turn of the 19th century this figure was below 10%.”

Transport and communication costs have decreased across the world In a substantial way, and the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has promoted preferential trade agreements particularly among developing countries. Trade among developing nations South-to-South tripled in the period 1980–2011.

International trade is a desirable outcome because it allows countries to specialize, and produce goods where they are relatively efficient, while at the same time, importing the goods where they have not competitive advantage. This is the essence of the comparative advantage argument that supports gains from trade in which the Ricardian doctrine on trade, allows countries to make what they are best a doing and import the rest.

Empirical evidence shows that while trade leads to economic growth on the aggregate, it also creates winners and losers within countries – so it is important for policy makers to consider distributional consequences of trade liberalization within each country.

There was a long period during the 18th century considered stagnant for international trade as globally the aggregate of exports and imports never exceeded 10%. In the course of the 19th century, a technological period triggered a period of remarkable growth in world trade which was called 'first wave of globalization'. The first wave of globalization came to an end with the beginning of WWI, when the rise of nationalism led to a slump in international trade.

After the end of WWII trade started growing again. With this new wave of globalization international trade has grown faster than ever before. Today the sum of exports and imports across nations is higher than the value of 50% of the global production.

https://ourworldindata.org/inter...

The last few decades have not only seen an increase in the volume of international trade, but also a growth in the number of countries joining WTO through which preferential trade agreement take place.

“These numbers include notified and non-notified preferential agreements (the source reports that only about two-thirds of the agreements currently in force have been notified to the WTO), and are disaggregated by country groups.”

This figure shows the increasingly important role of trade between developing countries (South-to-South trade), contrast by trade between developed and developing countries (North-to-South trade).

At the end of 1970s, North-South agreements accounted for more than half of all agreements but by 2010, they only accounted for about one quarter. Today, the majority of the existing preferential trade agreements are between emerging economies. The increase in trade among emerging economies over the last 50 years has been supplemented by a change in the composition of exported products from-to- these countries.

“These figures, produced by the World Bank, correspond to the Standard International Trade Classification, in which 'food' includes, among other, live animals, beverages, tobacco, coffee, oils and fats. The resistance that geography imposes on trade has long been studied in the empirical economics literature, typically under the label of 'gravity trade models'. The main conclusion in this literature is that trade intensity is strongly linked to geographic distance. Data from the 19th century onwards for countries around the world is available in the International Historical Statistics (IHS). These statistics – originally published under the editorial leadership of Brian Mitchell (since 1983)”

Links to trade data

Penn World Tables

Data: Real and PPP-adjusted GDP in US millions of dollars, national accounts (household consumption, investment, government consumption, exports and imports), exchange rates and population figures.

Correlates of War Bilateral Trade www.correlatesofwar.org

Data: Total national trade and bilateral trade flows between states. Total imports and exports of each country in current US millions of dollars and bilateral flows in current US millions of dollars. Export and import value index and volume index.

Available at: Online at http://data.worldbank.org

UN Comtrade

Data: Bilateral trade flows by commodity

Bilateral trade flows can be sorted by goods or services, monthly or annually, with choice of classification (including HS codes, SITC, and BEC). Data is likely to be very time consuming to collate as there is no bulk data download unless a user has a premium site license.

UNCTAD stat

UNCTAD stat reports export and import data between 1995 and 2016 but primarily to different regional groupings than any one country, so it's probably not best suited to comparing country-to-country bilateral flows.

Eurostat - COMEXT

Also, the Eurostat website 'Statistics Explained' publishes up-to-date statistical information on international trade in goods and services.

World Trade Organization - WTO

The WTO offers a bulk download of trade datasets which can be found here. Amongst these are annual WTO merchandise trade values and WTO-UNCTAD-ITC annual trade in services datasets.