Abstract
Recently, new data on international trade in goods by German firms became available that are based on transaction level data collected by the customs (for trade with partners outside the European Union) or reported by the firms when trading with partners inside the EU (for the statistics on intra-EU trade). The data cover detailed information on the goods traded, its value, its weight, and the country of destination (for exports) or origin (for imports). In short, the data do not only show “who trades and how much”, but also “who trades how much of which goods of which value and which weight with firms from which countries”. Furthermore, this information is available not only for firms from manufacturing industries, but for firms from all parts of the economy. Transaction level data that include information on the German firm involved in the transaction have been prepared by the Federal Statistical Office for the reporting years 2009 onwards. These data have been used in a number of studies that shed light on various aspects of Germany’s trade in goods for the first time. This survey summarizes what we have learnt from these studies.
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Notes
See Wagner (2016g) for a survey of the international literature that uses transaction level data on exports and imports of goods.
Note that firms with a value of exports to and imports from EU-countries that did not exceed 400,000 € in the previous year or in the current year do not have to report to the statistic on intra-EU trade. For trade with firms from non-member countries all transactions that exceed 1000 € (or have a weight that exceeds 1000 kg) are registered. For details see Statistisches Bundesamt, Qualitätsbericht Außenhandel, Januar 2011.
This has been confirmed by Melanie Scheller from the Federal Statistical Office in a mail sent on May 20, 2015.
Note that this identifier is missing for 0.67% of all export transactions and 1.2% of all import transactions for various reasons including that traders do not have a (German) tax identification number. Further details were not revealed to me.
For a discussion of the legal aspects of linking firm level micro data in Germany, available linked data sets and the potential of these data for economic analyses see Wagner (2017f).
An appendix table with a tabular survey of 32 papers that cover this literature is available on request. To facilitate comparison of results for Germany with results from similar studies that use data from other countries most of the topics discussed here are identical to those trated in my earlier survey of the international literature based on transaction level data in Wagner (2016g).
For evidence on the concentration of exports and imports in the largest trading firms see also the report on the Exporter and Importer Dynamics Database for Germany in Wagner (2016c).
Note that West German firms outperform East German firms at all four margins of exports in 2010, 20 years after the re-unification of Germany: West German firms have a larger propensity to export, export a larger share of total sales, export more goods and export to a larger number of countries. For a comprehensive analysis of the differences in export activities of firms in West Germany and East Germany see Wagner (2016a).
Information on exports is part of the World Bank’s Exporter Dynamics Database that has strictly comparable information for 70 countries; see http://econ.worldbank.org/exporter-dynamics-database.
For a comparable study on German exports (that is not based on transaction data but on data collected in regular surveys by official statistics) see Wagner (2013d).
For a report on the project KombiFiD (an acronym for Kombinierte Firmendaten für Deutschland, or combined firm data for Germany) that proceeded in this way see Biewen et al. (2012).
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All computations for the empirical studies with transaction data for Germany surveyed in this paper were done at the Research Data Centres of the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) in Wiesbaden and the Statistical Office of Berlin-Brandenburg in Berlin. I thank Melanie Scheller of Destatis for preparing the data and supervising my project.
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Wagner, J. Germany’s trade in goods. AStA Wirtsch Sozialstat Arch 12, 69–82 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11943-018-0219-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11943-018-0219-y