EU Trade Explorer

The EU Trade Explorer visualises European Union merchandise trade flows using Eurostat's official COMEXT database (DS-045409). It lets you explore imports and exports by product, trading partner, EU member state, and time period.

The data presented on this site is public. It comes directly from Eurostat .

COMEXT (trade) data is downloaded from Eurostat once a month, and PRODCOM (industrial production) data once a year. This corresponds to the Eurostat update schedule.

The European Commission offers two websites that allow data to be extracted from COMEXT:

• Easy Comext
• The Statistics page of Access2Markets.

This site offers a more modern, comprehensive, and accessible interface than these official sites. However, the underlying data is exactly the same.

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

Custom codes are series of digits corresponding to product ranges. Shorter codes (2–4 digits) give you broad product categories. Longer codes (6–8 digits) give you more specific products.

The search box on the landing page proposes custom codes based on their official definition in the Combined Nomenclature. Everyday terms do not always line up with the exact wording used by customs. The full nomenclature applicable in the current year can also be browsed directly from the landing page.

This nomenclature does not include some of the more detailed codes used by customs officers and businesses at the border. No publically available data exists for those. Thus, the website will return an error if you try a code outside of the permissible range.

If nothing relevant comes up, you can use a search engine to find a code. There are various free websites which allow you to browse custom nomenclatures from the EU or other countries. Look for "Combined nomenclature + product_name".You can also browse the official EU website for the Combined nomenclature.

Here is what to know:

• Up to the sixth digit, EU custom codes are based onto the international Harmonized System (HS) developed by the World Customs Organisation.
• Up to the eighth digit, custom codes are based on an EU's specific system called Combined Nomenclature (CN) system.
• Custom codes up to the fourteenth digit are defined by the TARIC system. TARIC stands for TARif Intégré Communautaire. It was created shortly after the CN in order to streamline the various national custom codes systems across EEC Member States.

Both the Reporter and Partner set dropdowns have a Custom… option at the bottom. They also have a search box at the top to quickly filter by name.

• Custom reporter group: select Custom… in the Reporter dropdown. A checklist of all potential reporters appears. Tick the ones you want. The dashboard will aggregate their trade as a single group. Available reporters are all EU member states as well as, depending on the exact customs codes, some of the EU's neighbouring countries.
• Custom partner selection: select Custom… in the Partner set dropdown. A searchable checklist of all available countries appears. This includes both EU and non-EU countries. Thus, you can visualise exports from Germany to France just as well as those from Germany to China.

  If you select more than eight countries, the dashboard will rank the partners by trade volume and display only the top ones among your selection. This is for legibility purposes, as stacked bar charts with more than 8 categories are visually not appealing.

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.

Every time you click Apply, the full query (product code, reporter, partners, period, frequency, outlier setting, exact tab 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.

Line charts have a small 100 button in their 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.

Stacked bar charts have a % button that switches to percentage-share view, showing each entity's proportion of the total rather than absolute values.

Both toggles reset automatically 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 click Excel to download an .xlsx file with two sheets: Metadata (product code, description, reporter, partner set, period, frequency, source, and export timestamp) and Data (the data from the graph). Click ✕ to flip back to the chart view.

Every chart also has a PNG button that downloads an image containing basic metadata. You can also take screenshots. Otherwise feel free to contact me if you want purpose-built graphs for your reports or presentations.

The backend of this website is independent from its frontend. It is possible to use the backend independently, by programmatically requesting data from the server directly.

API endpoints are documented in this file (machine-readable format) and this file (human-readable format). Most endpoints require authentication. You'll need to register with a valid email. There are rate limits to prevent abuse.

The site is available in all 24 official languages of the EU. The translations of customs codes are official. They are published by the Commission itself. But the website interface is automatically translated for all languages except those I speak myself: French, English, German, and Romanian. These computer-translated versions may contain errors. Your feedback on this is welcome.

This website runs on a small personal server, and some of the backend data processing is computationally intensive. It can only serve a handful of users at a time. Beyond that, it will slow down. If that happens, please wait a bit and try again later.

For COMEXT, Eurostat publishes trade data at up to 8-digit granularity (CN-level). Due to business confidentiality concerns, more granular data is only available to Commission staff. The same applies to many PRODCOM datasets. Individual access requests are possible on a case-by-case basis only.

In international trade statistics, the convention is that imports are recorded at CIF (Cost, Insurance and Freight) value. This corresponds to 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. That is the price of the goods loaded onto the vessel at the exporting country's port, excluding international transport and insurance.

Thus, 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.

It is not possible to adjust for this reporting bias from COMEXT data alone. The OECD has published an authoritative model along with adjustment tables to correct this effect. However, their adjustment tables stop at 6 digits, while Eurostat data is available up to 8 digits. Therefore, I took the decision not to mislead the user with partly adjusted/partly raw data.

In trade statistics, imports are attributed to the Member State where goods clear customs. But harbours are often just entry points into the EU market. The enterprises or consumers using those goods might be located in another Member State.

Since Rotterdam and Antwerp are the largest harbours in the EU, the Netherlands and Belgium appear as disproportionately large importers of many products, even if many goods are simply in transit to Germany, France, or other member states. Inversely, landlocked countries like Austria or Hungary are under-represented in import statistics. For background, see Eurostat's glossary entry on the Rotterdam effect.

This distortion does not affect graphs where the EU as a whole is the reporting country. However, it affects the reporter-level analysis for external trade, whereby imports or exports with the rest of the world are disaggregated by EU Member State. Within the EU, this distortion necessarily affects partner attribution too.

Finally, this distortion mainly affects bulk commodities transported by sea. It is much weaker for goods produced within the EU and transported by road or rail.

Correcting for this effect is not straightforward:

• COMEXT data does not contain transit declarations, so there is no way to disentangle consignment from final destination based on this single dataset.
• The UN Comtrade database, which records country of origin rather than consignment, could serve as a cross-reference. However its usefulness is limited:
  • Data before and after 2019 is not fully comparable following a methodology revision.
  • The most recent years are not yet available.
  • The Netherlands and Belgium themselves do not report systematically to the UN their transit trade.
• Ideally, the most rigorous approach would be to use the New Computerised Transit System (NCTS), the EU's digital customs system tracking goods moving under transit procedures. However, this data is not publicly available.

As a result, this dashboard flags graphs where either country features prominently but does not attempt to correct the underlying data.

The website collects only what it needs: your email, your password, the product codes you recently looked up, and short request logs (IP address, browser, pages visited) kept for at most one year. No ads, no profiling, no third-party analytics. Your password is only ever stored as a one-way hash, and your email is encrypted at rest.

The only cookies are two essential ones, for your login and your language, which is why there is no cookie banner.

You can delete your account and all associated data at any time from your account settings, instantly and permanently. Under the GDPR you may also access, correct, export, or object to the processing of your data, and complain to your data protection authority. For anything else, contact support@tradedashboard.eu.