EU Trade Dashboard

Product codes follow the EU's TARIC (Combined Nomenclature) system, which is a hierarchy of 2 to 10 digits. Eurostat publishes trade data at up to 8-digit granularity. You can use a search engine to find a code, or browse the official TARIC Classification.

1. Open the link above.
2. Click [Additional criteria] to expand the search form.
3. In the Search text field, type words describing your product (e.g. "laptop", "olive oil", "bicycle frame").
4. Set the language and ensure "Goods nomenclature descriptions" is selected in the in dropdown.
5. Review the results and pick the code that best matches your product.

Shorter codes (2–4 digits) give you broad product categories; longer codes (6–8 digits) give you more specific products. Use the Validate button in the sidebar to check a code before querying.

Reporters are the EU member states (or the EU as a whole) whose trade flows you want to analyse. By default the entire European Union is selected, but you can pick a single member state or choose a preset group (e.g. "Nordic countries").

Partners are the countries on the other side of the trade. Presets like "non-EU countries", "ASEAN", "BRICS", etc. give you curated groups. Choose Custom… to hand-pick individual countries from the full list.

Yes. Both the Reporter and Partner set dropdowns have a Custom… option at the bottom.

• Custom reporter group: select Custom… in the Reporter dropdown. A checklist of all EU member states appears. Tick the ones you want. The dashboard will aggregate their trade as a single group and show breakdowns per member in the "Main EU importers and exporters" tab.
• Custom partner selection: select Custom… in the Partner set dropdown. A searchable checklist of all available countries appears. Tick the ones you want. The dashboard will rank and display the top partners among your selection.

Both checklists have a search box at the top to quickly filter by name.

You can view the data aggregated by month, quarter, or year. Quarterly is the default and usually gives a good balance between detail and readability. Monthly data can be noisy for smaller trade flows; yearly data is useful for spotting long-term trends.

When Remove is selected (the default), unit prices (€/ton) that fall outside the 1.5×IQR fence for each period are excluded before computing weighted averages. This reduces the effect of mis-reported shipments, re-export distortions, or abnormally small consignments with extreme unit values.

Toggle to Keep if you want to see the raw unfiltered prices.

In international trade statistics, imports are recorded at CIF (Cost, Insurance and Freight) value — the price of the goods plus the cost of shipping and insuring them to the importing country's border. Exports are recorded at FOB (Free on Board) value — the price of the goods loaded onto the vessel at the exporting country's port, excluding international transport and insurance.

This means import prices are systematically higher than export prices for the same goods, typically by 5 % depending on the product and distance shipped. Direct comparison between import and export price levels should account for this margin. All price charts on this dashboard are labelled accordingly.

The IMF publishes country-pair CIF/FOB ratios in its Direction of Trade Statistics. This website does not use them as these are aggregate estimates per country pairs (eg. typical CIF from China to Belgium) "Correcting" Eurostat data with estimates that are not product-specific would distort the product-level data displayed here.

The Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI) measures how concentrated a market is among its trading partners. It ranges from 0 (trade spread perfectly evenly across many partners) to 10 000 (all trade with a single partner).

• Below 1 500 — low concentration (diversified supply/demand).
• 1 500 – 2 500 — moderate concentration.
• Above 2 500 — high concentration (dependency on few partners).

The chart plots separate lines for import and export concentration. A rising HHI may signal growing dependency on a single supplier or buyer — a potential vulnerability. A falling HHI suggests diversification.

The Terms of Trade (dashed line on the price chart) is the ratio of export prices to import prices, rebased so that the first period in the selected range = 100.

• Rising above 100 means export prices are growing faster than import prices — each ton exported buys more imports than before.
• Falling below 100 means import prices are outpacing export prices — a deterioration in purchasing power.

CIF/FOB caveat. Because import prices are recorded at CIF (including freight and insurance) while export prices are FOB (excluding them), the absolute ratio is systematically biased downward — imports look roughly 5 % more expensive than they would on a like-for-like basis. However, since the index is rebased to 100, this constant bias cancels out and the trend remains valid.

The main exception is when shipping costs themselves change sharply (e.g. the 2021–2022 container freight spike, or Suez/Red Sea disruptions). In those periods, the CIF component of import prices rises independently of the goods' value, which can push the Terms of Trade down even if underlying product prices haven't changed. Keep this in mind when interpreting sudden dips.

The trade balance is defined as exports minus imports. A positive bar means the reporter exports more than it imports (a surplus); a negative bar means it imports more (a deficit).

The Overview tab shows paired bars for each period: a solid bar for the balance in value (€) and a hatched bar for the balance in quantity (tons). The two are scaled so that the first period's bars are the same height — this lets you visually track whether prices are shifting: if the quantity bar grows taller than the value bar over time, it means the EU is trading more volume for relatively less money (falling prices), and vice versa.

Click the Table button on the chart to see the full per-partner breakdown of trade balances.

Note that import values are recorded at CIF level while export values are FOB, which slightly overstates trade deficits in value terms — typically by around 5 %. The quantity balance (tons) is not affected.

This is largely due to the Rotterdam/Antwerp effect. The ports of Rotterdam and Antwerp are the main entry points for goods arriving in the EU. In trade statistics, imports are attributed to the member state where goods clear customs — not where they are ultimately consumed. As a result, the Netherlands and Belgium appear as disproportionately large importers (and sometimes re-exporters) of many products, even when the goods are in transit to Germany, France, or other member states.

This distortion affects the "Main EU importers and exporters" tab and the geographic views of reporter-level data. It does not affect the partner-level analysis (which shows where goods come from or go to, not which EU country processes them).

The dashboard displays a warning when the Netherlands or Belgium feature prominently. For more information, see Eurostat's glossary entry on the Rotterdam effect.

Every line chart has a small 100 button in its top-right corner. Clicking it rebases all series so that the first data point equals 100. This makes it easy to compare relative changes over time between series that have very different absolute levels (e.g. import vs. export prices).

Click the button again to switch back to absolute values. The rebase resets automatically when you run a new query.

Yes. Click on any chart title (the heading above the chart) to edit it in place. Your custom title will be used when exporting to PNG or Excel, making it easy to prepare publication-ready graphics. Custom titles reset when you run a new query.

Charts with entity breakdowns (partners, reporters, trade balance) have a Table button that flips the chart to reveal a full ranking of up to 50 entities. From that table view you can:

• Excel — downloads an .xlsx file with two sheets: Metadata (product code, description, reporter, partner set, period, frequency, source, and export timestamp) and Data (the full entity ranking with quantities, values, and prices).
• ✕ — flips back to the chart view.

Every chart also has a PNG button that downloads a high-resolution image suitable for reports or presentations. If you've given the chart a custom title, it will appear in the exported image.

Yes. Every time you click Apply, the full query (product code, reporter, partners, period, frequency, outlier setting, and colour palette) is saved in the page URL. You can copy the URL from your browser's address bar and share it — anyone opening that link will see the same dashboard configuration and results.

All data displayed in this dashboard is sourced entirely from Eurostat's COMEXT database (DS-045409), the EU's reference database for international trade in goods. None of the data is proprietary. It is publicly available and freely accessible from Eurostat. This tool simply provides a convenient interface for exploring and visualising it.

Data is updated monthly by Eurostat and cached locally. If the server needs to fetch fresh data from Eurostat, you'll see a progress indicator. This can take a moment for large queries covering many reporters or partners.

This dashboard was built by Xavier Gillard (eutrade@sploing.be), a public affairs professional based in Brussels. It is a personal project and is not affiliated with any organisation or client.