ABS data for International Merchandise Trade

The International Merchandise Trade data is valuable for understanding import and export commodities passing through Australia’s ports, and airports, and is collected by the Australian Border Force from information submitted by exporters and importers or their agents.

International Merchandise Trade is detailed monthly data containing commodity information by tonnes and value, port of departure, port of arrival, country of origin and destination, and mode of transport.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics International Merchandise Trade data is referred to on the National Freight Data Hub as Customs data.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics cleans and aggregates the data by making adjustments for coverage, timing and valuation. Further, as part of the confidentiality process, some of the statistics for certain commodities are restricted in order to prevent their identification. The ABS methodology provides detailed information about the data cleaning process undertaken by ABS.

Further information about the data and useful links is available on the Customs Data project page.

The data can be downloaded as comma delimited files (CSV). The files can be large - in the case of imports, over 2GB and 20 million records. Excel will be unable to display all the records in the Imports and Exports files. Software like Power BI, Tableau, Python or R will be needed to work with these very large files.