TradeSift Edu is designed specifically for the higher education market as a tool to complement any course in international economics, or the economics of regional integration. It is useful for research students to provide contextual information and graphics for their research.
TradeSift Edu
TradeSift EDU Software
TradeSift Edu Software
Turning Data into Information and Information into Knowledge
Easily load your data on trade in goods, services or value-added trade, or data on tariffs into TradeSift Edu.
- Use standard trade databases, such as WITS, Comtrade, TRAINS, Eurostat, BACI and Global Trade Atlas.
- Provides students with the ability to look at trade data using any of the standard classification schemes (eg. BEC, SITC, HS etc) up to the 4-digit level.
- Enables the student to easily create, save and modify both Charts and Tables with a wide range of visual options. All the output is fully compatible with the standard Microsoft Office suite of programs.
- Provides user with the ability to look at trade data using any of the standard classification schemes (eg. BEC, SITC, HS etc.)
- Flexibility in data: Analyse standard or custom national trade data.
- Analyse annual, quarterly and monthly data.
- TradeSift comes with additional reference data, for example GDP data, country lists, currencies, nomenclatures, product code lists, concordances, etc.
Quickly view and summarise your data in powerful pivot grids. Visualise your data with instant charts and tables. Analyse the data with a full set of built in indicator calculations.
- Enables students to calculate diagnostic indicators based on the trade data. The indicators that are available include: revealed comparative advantage, export and import similarity, and intra-industry trade.
OPN – Openness
RCA – Revealed Comparative Advantage
FKI – Finger-Kreinin Index
IIT – Intra-Indsutry Trade - Rapid viewing and analysis of data on trade in goods, trade in services as well as barriers to trade such as tariffs.
- Easily filter the data, identify key products, save your selections for future use and analysis and analyse the performance of countries over time, in comparison to other countries, and in comparison to other sectors.
- Fast and easy calculation and graphing of indicators of trade performance, trade similarity, competitiveness, specialisation and more.
- Easy identification of ‘sensitive’ or strong sectors and hence export potential. Track the evolution of tariffs and identify the possible non-tariff barriers.
- Use custom product groups.
Create exercises for academic learning or use contextual information and graphics for your research and create empirical stories around key questions of trade.
As well as using standard textbooks and providing references to the academic research on trade issues, it is illuminating for students to look at actual data which helps them to think through key concepts.
- Comparative advantage: Here we ask students to compute and compare the revealed comparative advantages in the top exports of different countries and over time – and then, for example, ask them to explain what can be driving these differences and changes.
- Changing patterns of trade: Students are asked to look at the changing shares of trade of key sectors for certain economies such as China, and to consider what might be driving those changes. This leads to a range of possible explanations: changes in trade policy, changes in endowments, changes in competitiveness (possibly driven by changes in technology), or changes in tastes / demand.
- Distribution of the gains from trade: Again students are asked to compute and consider changes in the structure of trade for certain countries, and the to consider what the impact might be on factor rewards
- Trade and imperfect competition: a natural indicator to consider here is the indicator of intra-industry trade and its evolution over time either by country or industry. IIT can also be used to discuss the vertical fragmentation of the supply chain.
- Trade Policy: Here students are asked to look at differences in tariffs across countries, and changes over time and to consider the impact of those changes on welfare. This naturally leads into a discussion of small country v large country effects. You can also look at differential tariffs at different levels of processing to consider the issue of the effective rate of protection
- Regional Integration: key concepts here are trade creation and trade diversion. Theory suggests that trade creation will be more likely when countries already trade a lot with each other prior to the agreement. So students are asked to look at and graph intra-regional trade shares both before and after agreements and to provide an interpretation. There is also a direct link between trade creation and export similarity which is captured by the Finger-Kreinin index of trade similarity.
As well as the software itself, we have developed a set of sample exercises available to instructors which is made available with the site licence for the course. A sample exercise is available on request.