Canada profile data incorrect

[bmacgreg]

Hello,

I just wanted to point out that the data on the Canada profile are incorrect (http://atlas.media.mit.edu/profile/country/can/).

Specifically, there appear to be a lot of products missing on the export side and the breakdown does not match official data from the Canadian government's trade databases. Notably, oil exports, the most important good export, are missing in the breakdown. You can confirm this through the following site:
https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/tdo-dcd.nsf/eng/home

On another note, I suggest you provide a generic e-mail address that people can use to send comments as well. I almost did not submit this comment because I didn't feel like creating a log in.

B

[alexandersimoes]

Thanks for your comments, I have just looked into this issue you mention about canada's exports being incorrent and it seems this is due to a discrepency between the BACI cleaned dataset we are using and the raw comtrade data (closer to what is reported by countries). I'm not sure if you're familiar with the issues and discrepencies that can arise when using export datasets but I would suggest giving this paper a read - http://www.cepii.fr/CEPII/fr/publications/wp/abstract.asp?NoDoc=2726, as this organization is the source of the data we are using.

Just to be sure the issue wasn't on our end I revisited the raw BACI data and found petroleum completely lacking from the top exports (as your mentioned) for 2012! In fact it is the 20th product, take a look below to see the top 20 exports by value:

hs4	val_usd	name
8703	47632275183.732254	Cars
8802	7322189599.078005	Planes Helicopters and/or Spacecraft
2701	6766734993.451672	Coal Briquettes
3104	6519906299.203524	Potassic Fertilizers
1001	6317661362.084509	Wheat
7601	5570989188.4639845	Raw Aluminium
1205	5190981929.15665	Rapeseed
3004	5162262035.540839	Packaged Medicaments
2601	4569647193.567511	Iron Ore
4703	4390976471.110193	Sulfate Chemical Woodpulp
3901	4022054689.275655	Ethylene Polymers
7108	3730861085.933786	Gold
1514	3398593051.0063996	Rapeseed Oil
8411	3231886350.0235434	Gas Turbines
2603	3107533150.159405	Copper Ore
0203	2828447043.5027623	Pig Meat
8803	2758516000.644594	Aircraft Parts
8407	2740172896.059031	Spark-Ignition Engines
7501	2563312388.97497	Nickel Mattes
2710	2514531074.55837	Refined Petroleum

We are looking to add the raw comtrade export data to the platform in the future, so hopefully this should resolve many of the data issues you and others have found.