For both merchandise and trade in services statistics, conversion of values from national currencies into United States dollars is done by means of currency conversion factors based on official exchange rates. The conversion factors applied to the data are published quarterly in the UN Monthly Bulletin of Statistics: External trade conversion factors and also made available in a country’s metadata on UN Comtrade.

Q: I am using the data from the UN Comtrade database and I am assuming that the trade values given are in current dollar values. Is that the case or are they in constant values? Are the values given in current dollar values by reporters or are they converted into dollars by yourselves – if so at what exchange rate? How are exchange rates applied to convert to US dollars in UN Comtrade data and where can I find these exchange rates?

A: Trade values are in current dollar values. Some reported datasets are sent in US dollars, but most reported datasets are received in national currency. We convert these datasets to US dollars by applying the conversion factor from IMF/IFS. You can find these conversion factors in the metadata section on our website.

Q: I need to double check about exchange rates so I interpret the statistics correctly. When extracting trade data over a long period of time (in my case export figures over 10 years), is the exchange fixed or year-on-year? If fixed, where can I find the exchange rate used? However, as I understand it from the explanatory notes the exchange rates are year-on-year based on the rates stated for each country each year. If so, I notice that the exchange rates of EUR to USD is different for example Netherlands and Austria in 2003. Is this the result of the exchange rate being calculated by weighting the monthly exchange rate with the monthly volume of trade?

A: We use the US dollar series of the IFS, which is based on the monthly average of the official daily exchange rates.  The average annual exchange rates are obtained separately for imports and for exports by taking into account the monthly value of imports (or exports) and the monthly average of the official daily exchange rates. For more detailed information, please see attached document on the IFS exchange rate calculation.

Update as of 2023: Annual conversion factors are no longer calculated based on the average monthly exchange rates. We take the figures directly from IMF/IFS for both monthly and annual conversion factors.