Support : Publications : Chronolog Archives : March/April 2005

Dialog TradStat Enhanced

Dialog TradStat is the most comprehensive online source for international trade data. It allows you to track global trade statistics from 29 official government sources detailing 90 percent of the world's trade.

The countries supplying trade data directly to Dialog TradStat use the Harmonized Coding System, which is the standard adopted by more than 177 countries. Maintained by The World Customs Organization, both export and import statistics are classified with this controlled system.

In addition, and for those countries not represented in the core list of 29 countries, Dialog TradStat is able to "deduce" a country's trade figures based on the exports declared by the 29 Dialog TradStat trading partners. This data can be helpful when the target country is late in providing trade data or when you suspect that the official customs declarations are unreliable (some suppression of data can occur in "monopolistic" or sensitive industries in which sharing trade information would have a detrimental effect on the economic players' businesses). Enforcing a deduced report in this case allows you to check and compare data from different sources.

Use Dialog TradStat to:

• Track global trade statistics
• Assess market share
• Monitor price fluctuations
• Monitor trends in trade flow
• Identify trading countries

Depending on the type of trade data you want to obtain and analyze, Dialog TradStat offers five pre-defined report types that are easy to fill out, process and make available online within seconds.

The report types offered are:

• Key Country Report — identifies which countries are involved in a market, who the major players are, and lists the average prices of your product around the world
  
  
• Region Report — consolidates import or export trade data for all countries in the European region and shows their worldwide trading partners
  
  
• Sector Breakdown Report — provides an overview of the total industry and can indicate the most significant product within that industry, or what percentage a particular product represents in a market
  
  
• Imports/Exports Report — shows a balance of trade over a date range of your choice for one country and all its trading partners worldwide
  
  
• Trend Report — shows either import or export trends in trade for a product and a country with a date range of your choice

Dialog TradStat Adds Enhancements

Based on customer feedback, Dialog TradStat has added enhancements including a new Reports Library, Alert Report Library, improved report layout and a simplified chart builder.

Reports Library

After the reports are processed, they are stored in the new Reports Library, a central repository for all of your stored reports. You can check the status of a report you have created, monitor whether a report has been processed, determine whether it has failed entirely, or whether it has been processed but no new data found. Reports are saved for a maximum of 10 days.

Figure 1: Reports Library

To link to the Reports Library, click the Reports Library button.

Figure 1 illustrates different options available. The first three columns of the table are sortable. You can verify names already given to reports and templates from this table. For example, you might want to see all of your trend, import or export reports and your templates. The links listed below the template name column go to the template edit page, whereas the add link in the Alerts column takes you to the create alert page. The chart icon lets you create graphs quickly and easily.

Alert Report Library

Figure 2: Alert Report Library

The Alert Report Library has the same functionality as the Reports Library except you can display or download reports created from an Alert. Results of your Alerts are available for 42 days at no extra cost. The edit link lets you make changes to the Alert setup. Access the Alert report library via the new search page.

Improved Layout

• Changes to the report layout make post-processing for spreadsheet (CSV) layouts simpler. For example, an empty total cell now contains new codes, and blank fields are replaced by zeroes.
  
  
• Price and percentage calculations are more precise because now only the final figures are rounded after all calculations have been completed.
  
  
• The date (month and year) is shown in each column.
  
  
• Quantity2 is shown in a column beside Quantity1
  
  
• HTML display (portrait and landscape) are not restricted by report size.
  
  
• Alerts in CSV format (online or via e-mail) have the extension .CSV.

Charts

Figure 3: Chart Builder

The chart builder in Figure 3 has been completely redesigned and simplified to include three chart options: pie chart, bar chart and line chart.

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