German foreign trade in the long run. Development of a data set in SITC standard. ("GerTrade")

German foreign trade in the long run.
Development of a data set in SITC standard. ("GerTrade")

For this long-term project, we will reconstruct German foreign trade statistics from 1880 on- wards based on the United Nation’s Standard International Trade Classification (SITC). We will apply this widely established statistical standard to the commodity structure of German foreign trade at the most disaggregated level possible, covering imports and exports, in volumes and values, each at an annual basis, for all trade partners of Germany, at the product level (SITC, 5-digit), critically making use of published as well as unpublished archival material. By applying this standard, historical trade data will be of the same standard as the UN Comtrade database, thus allowing to connect the newly compiled data with well established data that ranges until the present day.