Data source · Multilateral official · Census & register

United Nations Statistics Division, UN DESA — UN Comtrade

Headquarters: New York
Founded: Trade statistics reported by national authorities since 1962
Funding: Maintained by a UN Secretariat division financed from the UN regular budget, funded by member-state assessed contributions on a gross-national-income scale with a 22 per cent ceiling and a 0.001 per cent floor for 2025–2027.
Governance: Maintained by the UN Statistics Division within UN DESA; national agencies designated by each country report their own trade statistics, which UNSD compiles and standardizes.
Published: Continuous — processed as data providers send it, with provisional annual figures early in the year and later revisions; there is no predetermined schedule.
Licence: UN Comtrade data are copyrighted by the United Nations; its policy on use and re-dissemination exempts free-of-charge data visualization applications, and SPHRE publishes transformed aggregated derivatives (annual totals, top-partner and product-section shares with computed rest-of-world residuals), not the underlying records. The multi-year backbone arrives via the World Bank WITS mirror, which redistributes UN Comtrade with the permission of the United Nations — the governing terms stay UN Comtrade’s own regardless of access path.