OEC: The Observatory of Economic Complexity | Hacker News Reader

OEC: The Observatory of Economic Complexity

oec.world

41 pointsjonbaer12 comments

The first page I looked at shows exports of the US https://oec.world/en/visualize/tree_map/hs92/export/usa/all/...

It doesn't include software, so seemingly ignores the economic activity of some of the largest companies in the US. Does anyone know what's going on there? I guess software isn't visible at customs boarder checks, so isn't included.

Physical goods are easier to track than services, since the former have to go through a port.

The UN has made great efforts to standardize goods data, but AFAIK they don't have services data. This is the data that this website is using: https://comtrade.un.org/.

That said, the Harvard version of The Observatory of Economic Complexity, the Atlas of Economic Complexity (there is an MIT/Harvard rivalry here), includes services data: http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore?country=231&product=und....

From the Atlas's website: "The raw trade data on goods are derived from countries’ reporting to the United Nations Statistical Division (COMTRADE). The trade data on services are from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Direction of Trade Statistics database, via the World Development Indicators."

They might be Irish Exports :)

Several comments seem to be somewhat critical of the visualisations and the lack of quote data sources.

I’m an economist and I have to say this is a beautiful exercise in visualisation. The Federal Reserve’s Economic Data (FRED) facility is my go-to source of quick numbers, alongside Bloomberg and Wolfram Alpha, but these visual depictions are simply beautiful.

Congratulations to whomever assembled this together.

What is the 'Broadcasting Equipment' which is China's largest export category and one of US's largest import category.

Also the site would benefit from having some interesting curated content on the landing page. Hiding all interesting content behind a search box, does not give any indication of what sort of content is available.

Broadcasting Equipment is also known as television, radio broadcasting, antenna, digital, wireless, FM, AM, bluetooth, microwave. https://oec.world/en/profile/hs92/8525/

So anything with a radio, like phones for example.

Doesn't seem to include services - at least that's my rationale for why the trade deficit of UK appears as so damn large - about 50% of imports, $300bn or so

Couldn't find any references to data sources. This would be much more serious and useful if sources were listed.

Of course, it would be even more useful if there was a "download all data" link...

I'm guessing the source is https://comtrade.un.org/ Who else but the UN has that kind of data?

From the other comment it looks like they indeed use comtrade.

The IMF and Worldbank have some similar public data, although not in that amount of detail. [1] And I recently stumbled upon a project that tries to standartise the API for a lot of official data sources [2].

[1] https://www.imf.org/external/np/ds/matrix.htm [2] https://db.nomics.world/

https://oec.world/en/resources/data/

Great,thanks!

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