This block gives the general economic outlooks and their relation to international trade, as for instance given in UN/DESA's World Economic Situation and Prospects, in UNCTAD's World Investment Reports, and in national contributions such as Japan's White Paper on International Economy and Trade. It addresses related policy questions, such as trade policy, coherence in trade regimes, the effects of globalization on economic growth, innovation, employment and sustainability, and the impact of international trade on job creation, taking into account the trading partner country or the kinds of product traded.

International trade statistics cover international merchandise trade statistics (IMTS), statistics of international trade in services (SITS), trade in goods and services components of the Balance of Payments (BOP) statistics, foreign affiliates statistics (FATS), foreign direct investments (FDI) statistics and statistics on the international sourcing of business functions. Specifically, IMTS are official statistics on the movements of goods between countries and areas, and are compiled to serve the needs of many users from public and private sector, academia, and the public at large.

Different users need different data for a range of purposes, such as

1. monitoring trade agreements and settling trade disputes;
2. developing economic policies;
3. market analysis to find supply sources or foreign markets;
4. monitoring commodity markets; and
5. infrastructure planning (harbors, airports, roads etc.) and compilation of transport statistics.

SITS covers trade in services in the conventional sense of transactions (exports and imports) between residents and non-residents on BOP basis. In addition, it covers services delivered through enterprises that are locally established but foreign-controlled. The latter types of transactions are covered by FATS and FDI. Also discussed are cases where individuals are temporarily present abroad for the purpose of supplying a service.

International trade statistics and business statistics have common features starting of course with the fact that in the end the businesses are the ones making decisions on trading internationally and on making other kinds of international business arrangements, such as FDI, establishing foreign affiliates and outsourcing of business functions. Linking trade and business statistics will offer new insights with political and analytical relevance, in particular to analyze the impact of globalization on the competitiveness and economic success of businesses. One promising approach to get more information on businesses involved in international trade is to proceed with micro-level data linking which has several attractive features.

The System of National Accounts (SNA) is the internationally agreed standard set of recommendations on how to compile measures of economic activity in accordance with strict accounting conventions based on economic principles. The accounting framework of the SNA allows economic data to be compiled and presented in a format that is designed for purposes of economic analysis, decision-taking and policy making. In the SNA, transactions between a resident unit and the rest of the world are recorded as if the units in the rest of the world were another sector of the economy.

The production and generation of income accounts relate only to transactions within the national economy but flows in all other accounts potentially have an entry for the rest of the world. Exports are shown as uses of the rest of the world and imports as resources from the rest of the world. Balance of Payment (BOP) looks at the same stocks and flows from the point of view of the domestic economy. Thus the BOP entries are the mirror image of the SNA entries relating to the rest of the world. In BOP stock levels are usually referred to as positions.

The international accounts for an economy summarize the economic relationships between residents of that economy and the rest of the world. They comprise (a) the balance of payments, which summarizes transactions between residents and non-residents during a specific time period and (b) the international investment position (IIP), which shows at a point in time the value of financial assets of residents of an economy that are claims on non-residents, and the liabilities of residents of an economy to non-residents.

The existing measurement frameworks of SNA and BOP do not fully grasp the measurement of economic interdependencies, exposures and vulnerabilities of countries through the global value chains or through operations of multi-national enterprises. A number of the issues are difficult to measure, such as manufacturing services on input owned by others, intra-firm trade, ownership of intellectual property products and other economic interdependencies inside global value chains. Many international task teams are working on aspects of international trade and economic globalization, but an overarching framework is still missing.

Two main initiatives for the development of new indicators in the area of international trade are the OECD-WTO initiative to develop measures for trade in value-added, and the Eurostat-OECD Trade by Enterprise Characteristics (TEC) project for the development of indicators derived from the TEC database.

The OECD-WTO initiative on trade in value-added stems from the notion that a significant portion of the measured rise in trade volumes over the last two decades is accounted for by increasing trade in intermediate goods, in line with the worldwide trend towards delivering goods and services through global value chains involving many countries and many multi-national enterprises and their foreign affiliates. As a consequence, current discussions are reflecting on the need to re-design multilateral trade rules since many countries are potentially affected even by bilateral tariff and non-tariff measures because of the global value chains. The World Trade Organization itself has indicated that we need to re-think the measurement of trade, and that negotiations and trade agreements should preferably be done on the basis of trade in value-added.

Indicators which have been developed within the context of trade in value-added are, for instance, the import content of exports, value-added induced by export, or value-added induced by unit of export. Indicators from the TEC database include, as mentioned earlier, exporting industries broken down by foreign ownership, enterprise size class and export intensity. Other globalization indicators include capital movements and foreign direct investment, the economic activity of multinational enterprises, the internationalization of technology, and international trade.

These globalization indicators help identify the economic activities of countries that are under foreign control, and more particularly the contribution of multinational enterprises to growth, employment, productivity, labor compensation, research and development, technology diffusion and international trade. These indicators shed new light on financial, technological and trade interdependencies.