ABS data for International Merchandise Trade

The ABS International Merchandise Trade data is valuable for understanding import and export commodities passing through Australia’s ports, and airports. It contains detailed records of commodity information by tonnes and value, port of departure, port of arrival, country of origin and destination, and mode of transport. The historical data from 2005 to 2020 is presented quarterly and the data from July 2020 is presented monthly.

This data is collected by the Australian Border Force from information submitted by exporters and importers or their agents. The Australian Bureau of Statistics then 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.

The data can be downloaded as comma delimited files (CSV). The files can be large - in the case of imports, over 1GB and 5 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.

As the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ International Merchandise Trade data is derived from customs data it is part of the National Freight Data Hub Customs data project and additional information about the data and useful links are available on the National Freight Data Hub Customs Data project page.