WORLD TRADE DATA: CAN THEY HELP SAFEGUARDS VERIFICATION ACTIVITIES?

摘要

In the framework of a European Commission Support Programme Task, the IAEA and the EuropeanCommission Joint Research Centre have conducted a survey of world trade data from open sources. As aresult, a catalogue was produced. This contained a list of those ‘services’ that provide statistical andtransactional trade data on all categories of goods. Statistical data generally cover the whole world and areoften provided for free by international and governmental organizations, and statistical offices. Data on tradetransactions, typically provided by private companies, can be national or multinational in scope. The surveywas based upon the hypothesis that trade databases may be useful in support of IAEA verification activities.For instance, trade data may provide insights to support the verification of additional protocol declarationsand nuclear material transfers, as well as give indications of possible undeclared activities. Since trade data isindexed in data services by the Harmonized System (HS) nomenclature of goods, a prerequisite to use thistype of data is to ‘map’ items of interest to safeguards verification with HS categories. This paper reviewsavailable world trade data services, with an emphasis on geographical and temporal coverage, type of dataprovided and accessibility. It then addresses the challenging task of correlating categories of items of interestwith HS codes. The paper concludes by exploring some possible uses of trade data for nuclear verificationpurposes.