Interactive Map: The Flow of International Trade

I love the idea, and had no idea this data was available. However, the visualization is close to useless (except it looks good on news sites). I wanted to examine @Theodores comment about Brexit, but I can't even do something as simple as figuring out whether the UK is a net importer from / exporter to Europe (or approximately equal).

It makes me want to play around with the data [1] myself, although getting all the data looks a bit involved. And it's not an easy visualization, either. Not only is there a geometry problem and a dimensional problem, it looks like countries might import from and export to the same country in the same type of good. In 2015 for "26 - Ores, slag, and ash", apparently the UK imported $187m from Canada and exported $155m to Canada. (But maybe the units are $1k, as the UK importing $2+ billion total seems a bit low?) Not only does that seem a little counter-intuitive--what ores is the UK even mining, let alone exporting? Anyway, representing both directions seems challenging.

[1] https://comtrade.un.org/data/

This visualisation makes a point regarding 'Brexit'. Look how much trade the UK does with Europe and how much trade is done with the rest of the world. Even though everything says 'made in China' far, far more trade is done with Germany and the other large European nations.

Well, that's kind of pretty... but perhaps there's a better way to show individual good flows? I see a rainbow between the USA and Mexico, for example, but I can't really make out which colors are going where.

Perhaps if each color had its own location on each country's map? This would add confusion, in that folks might thing the location is where the good comes from ("Why is wheat coming out of Virginia?"), but it would allow seeing that (say) Mexico exports "X" times more food to the USA than the other way around.

It looks like the visualization was made with d3.js, can anyone explain how one may recreate something similar, or is it hand-rolled?

Looks cool but not doesn't provide much insight. I would highly recommend the Observatory of Economic Complexity. Unsexy 2d block visualizations but conveys relevant data very well:

http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/

Thank you; A picture is worth a thousand words;

I've seen this before but it still looks like an amazing visualization at least of the bigger picture

From the map it looks like the US trade imbalance with China and the EU (imports more than it exports).