This Guide is designed to introduce participants to using R to calculate trade indices and indicators that are most commonly used when implementing international trade and trade policy analysis. It focuses on providing brief descriptions of the discussed indices and indicators, including their definitions and formulas, typical data sources and provides examples of R code that can be used to both implement calculations, and visualize the results.
This essentially is a replication script that is based on the popular publication developed by Trade, Investment and Innovation Division of UNESCAP titled A Handbook of Commonly Used Trade Indices and Indicators and authored by Mia Mikic and John Gilbert, and thus follows the basic structure of this publication. It recreates most of the trade indices and indicators from the handbook using R programming software.
R Scripts and explanations are available at https://r.tiid.org/Trade_indicators.
An updated version of handbook of commonly used trade indices and indicators is available here.
