Interface with and extract data from the United Nations Comtrade API https://comtradeplus.un.org/. Comtrade provides country level shipping data for a variety of commodities, these functions allow for easy API query and data returned as a tidy data frame. More info can be found here. Full API documentation can be found here.
The Comtrade API has been undergoing updates in 2023. At this point the legacy API has been taken offline (see here). The comtradr package has accommodated these changes. Some premium functions like bulk download are still not supported in the package, but we are working on it. See https://github.com/ropensci/comtradr/issues/68 for details.
Please report issues, comments, or feature requests. We are very much looking for feedback on the usability of the new functions.
Please note that this package is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.
For information on citation of this package, use citation("comtradr")
Currently, the package is not on CRAN, but we plan on publishing to CRAN in the near future. Install the current development version from this repo:
Once it is on CRAN, you can install with:
Do not be discouraged by the complicated access to the token - you can do it! đĒ
As stated above, you need an API token, see the FAQ of Comtrade for details on how to obtain it:
You need to follow the detailed explanations, which include screenshots, in the Wiki of Comtrade to the letter. âī¸ I am not writing them out here, because they might be updated regularly. However, once you are signed up, select the comtrade - v1 product, which is the free API.
If you are in an interactive session, you can call the following function to save your API token to the environment file for the current session.
If you are not in an interactive session, you can register the token once in your session using the following base-r function.
If you would like to set the comtrade key permanently, we recommend editing the project .Renviron file, where you need to add a line with COMTRADE_PRIMARY = xxxx-your-key-xxxx.
âšī¸ Do not forget the line break after the last entry. This is the easiest by taking advantage of the great usethis package.
Now we can get to actually request some data. Let us query the total trade between China and Germany and Argentina, as reported by China.
# Country names passed to the API query function must be spelled in ISO3 format.
# For details see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1_alpha-3
# You can request a maximum interval of twelve years from the API
example1 <- comtradr::ct_get_data(
reporter = 'CHN',
partner = c('ARG', 'DEU'),
start_date = 2010,
end_date = 2012
)
# Inspect the return data
str(example1)Return all exports related to Wine from Argentina to all other countries, for years 2007 through 2011.
library(comtradr)
# Fetch all shrimp related commodity codes from the Comtrade commodities DB.
# This vector of codes will get passed to the API query.
wine_codes <- ct_commodity_lookup("wine", return_code = TRUE, return_char = TRUE)
# API query.
example2 <- ct_get_data(
reporter = "ARG",
flow_direction = "export",
partner = "all",
start_date = 2007,
end_date = 2011,
commodity_code = wine_codes
)
# Inspect the output
str(example2)