Trade & industry statistics

The production and dissemination of timely, periodic, harmonious, accessible, comparable and complete external trade statistics and indicators in Arab countries, in line with international statistical standards, are vital for economic policy formulation and regional integration.

Industrial statistics on Arab countries that are highly reliable, flexible, and consistent provide a key source of information for the public and private sectors, experts and researchers in the field of industrial and economic development in the region. ESCWA provides key indicators related to industrial production, output, value added, and average wages of employees in manufacturing industries, based on international definitions and concepts of industrial statistics.

Our approach

Our partners

ESCWA member States; United Nations Statistics Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs https://unstats.un.org; League of Arab States www.lasportal.org/ar/Pages/default.aspx; Arab Industrial Development and Mining Organization (AIDMO) www.aidmo.org; UNIDO www.unido.org. 

Our activities

The ESCWA economic statistics team aims to strengthen national, regional and international coordination and collaboration by compiling and disseminating external trade statistics annually; assisting member States in providing high-quality external trade data and statistics; promoting the harmonization of national external trade statistical practices with international statistical standards, methods and concepts; and exploring alternative and complementary data sources provided by new technologies. 

ESCWA has developed an online trade statistics portal for the Arab region that provides an interactive database of detailed trade statistics on the HS 6-digit level for all Arab countries. Data are available from 2012 and are updated frequently. The portal also provides handy dashboards that enable users to retrieve data according to economic groupings, product groups, and intra-regional and regional groups.

Within a joint project with the Islamic Development Bank, ESCWA has translated into Arabic the Arab Trade handbook, developed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund on measuring the size and/or dimensions of digital trade.

ESCWA also compiles industrial statistics from member States as per the most recent revisions of the International Standard Industrial Classification of All Economic Activities (ISIC) when available, following internationally agreed recommendations, and based on the conceptual framework of the System of National Accounts 2008 (2008 SNA).