Telling Trade Stories With Data Viz Tools

Q&A: The Atlas of Economic Complexity
Journalists can download entire data sets from the Atlas of Economic Complexity, says Harvard Growth Lab's Annie White and Tim Cheston.
by Hope Kahn, National Press Foundation
The Atlas of Economic Complexity allows reporters to produce data visualizations showing any country’s trends in imports and exports for 6,000 products and services.
“Simply put, it’s a tool that helps us to understand economic opportunity and dynamics for every single country in the world,” Harvard Growth Lab’s director of software tools Annie White told NPF’s International Trade Fellows, alongside senior manager of applied research Tim Cheston.
The Atlas uses data from the UN’s Comtrade database, which collects nationally reported data semiannually. The Growth Lab adjusts the data to maximize reporting, making it possible to chart thousands of products and services, searchable by name or specific trade codes. The Atlas also shows the growth of industries in individual countries over multiple years, allowing for the comparison of certain countries against each other.
Questions from the journalists
How is it determined which countries are compared to one another?
White said that they use an equation with a few different variables. These include the country’s proximity to other countries, the country’s GDP and the country’s export basket value.
And while there isn’t a way to currently customize it, Cheston suggests manually searching for comparable countries, and creating your own table from it.
Is the data cross-checked or verified?
Cheston said that the export data comes from what is reported from the exporter and importer.
“So the most frequent feedback we always get is to say, ‘This does not reflect our national accounts.’ And we have to say, ‘This is what you reported to the UN Comtrade.’ And thankfully we clean it up by rectifying what the importer reported versus what the exporter reported, what the value is.”
Is the complexity of the index really weighted to the countries with which you measure imports and exports as opposed to the size of the domestic income?
“We find that often some of your most complex exports are exported to your neighbors or exported actually to some low-complexity settings in which many either landlocked countries or others can actually afford a lower quality of product because it is so costly to send it to their landlocked neighbor,” said Cheston.
Do you open the public to query your data by API or REPL?
“We don’t have a public API for the Atlas. It could be coming down the road,” said White. “And some of the code is available as open source in our GitHub. But really the most access we give to users is downloading the data set entirely.”
Access the full transcript here.
Speakers: Annie White, Director, Software Tools, Harvard Growth Lab at Harvard Kennedy School
Tim Cheston: Senior Manager, Applied Research, Harvard Growth Lab at Harvard Kennedy
School
Transcript, summary and resources: nationalpress.org/topic/trade...
This fellowship is part of an ongoing program of journalism training and awards for trade coverage sponsored by the Hinrich Foundation.
This video was produced within the Evelyn Y. Davis studios. NPF is solely responsible for the content.