Part 3: Chapter 6 - Long-term Changes in the Global Trade Structure and East Asia

The Standard International Trade Classification (SITC) has been revised three times, and thus fail to provide continuity.Therefore, trade analysis has to be limited to the short term.The United Nations has launched a service allowing on-line searches of the UN Comtrade Database trade data , enabling access to trade statistics from 1962 by SITC-R1 to 2003.However, a weak point of this classification is that new articles that were newly added in SITC-R3 are missing.These statistics are not suited the analysis of individual articles because there was an increase in the articles included in Article 7, covering machinery.In spite of these problems, trade statistics based on SITC-R1 have enormous importance for the long-term analysis of developing countries.In this chapter, I analyze structural changes in trade for East Asia (Japan, NIES, China, ASEAN4), India, the US, EU and examines the utility of trade statistics for the long term.The article is divided into 23 categories for analysis.