DOTS on econ.bc.edu

Direction of Trade Statistics on Virtual Data Center

The Virtual Data Center interface to IMF DOTS data allows you to select the series you want to retrieve, for specified countries and years, via a web browser. In order to access the data you must have a valid BC username and password. The data are either displayed in your browser or, more usefully, downloaded as a text file to your desktop system. A Stata program is provided that will transform the data to a more usable format. However, use of these data in any other package or spreadsheet is equally feasible, since the data are in text form. Boston College receives monthly updates to the DOTS database containing import and export data on over 250 nations and groups of nations (OPEC, IMF, etc.). This database, incorporating the Direction of Trade Statistics Historical release of May 2002, contains annual, quarterly, and monthly data on over 75,000 timeseries from 1948 to present for annual series and 1960 to present for quarterly and monthly series.

The DOTS database is comprised of separate database tables for annual, quarterly, and monthly frequencies. Not all series are available at all frequencies (particularly for developing countries, for which only annual data are often available). To use the econ.bc.edu database interface, you choose:

the category of data (exports, imports CIF, imports FOB),
the frequency (A/Q/M) for which data are desired,
the first and last years, and
the source and partner countries for which data are desired.

Bilateral trade flows are recorded with respect to the "source" country--e.g. German exports--to a "partner" country, e.g. France. There should be no expectation that German exports to France match French imports from Germany, given statistical discrepancies in trade data.

You may only retrieve data of one timeseries frequency in a given retrieval request. If data of more than one frequency are needed, use a separate request for each frequency.

After making these selections, you are given a summary of your retrieval request (which you should print for further reference), and offered the choice to either Display Data or Download Data. If you DIsplay the data, it will appear in an HTML table in the web browser. Data in an HTML table are not machine-readable; this option is provided only for convenience. To work with the data, use the Download option. Note well the warning that if you retrieve more than one file to your desktop, the files must be renamed to prevent corruption. These text files can be accessed by any text editor, word processor or spreadsheet. Stata do-files are also provided to reformat (reshape) the data from the downloaded form to a panel format. The Stata module tscollap may be used to convert data from a higher to a lower frequency (e.g. quarterly averages of monthly series).

Please note that the downloaded series are identified by their country codes (ccodes), which never change. These country codes are identical to those used in International Financial Statistics.

The data tables for DOTS are quite large, with the monthly table containing over 12 million rows. You are urged to retrieve a reasonable number of series. A request to retrieve a sizable fraction of the dataset may fail due to limitations of the hardware and software being used for database handling.

Last updated: 5 November 2004 by ATS