World trade, 1995–2024 and the long view

How has world merchandise trade evolved in the BACI era, and what structural shifts has it been through? Eight figures: the level of world exports, the trade-to-GDP ratio, the sectoral composition, the concentration of exporters, the top-15 league table, growth dispersion 2019–2024, the thick-edge network of bilateral flows and the ranked bar view of the top-20 corridors, and a 200-year frame that puts the last three decades in historical perspective.

The globalization ratio

The ratio of trade (exports plus imports) to GDP is the canonical single-number measure of how globalized the world economy is. Subramanian & Kessler (2013, PIIE WP 13-6) named the 1990s–2010s run-up “hyperglobalization” and dated its plateau to the aftermath of 2008–09.

What the world trades

Structural composition of world exports at the HS section level (goods only; note that Fig 2’s WDI trade/GDP ratio covers goods + services). The twenty-one HS sections bundle the 5,022 six-digit product lines into coherent groups: machinery & electronics (section 16), mineral fuels (section 5), chemicals (6), vehicles (17), and base metals (15). Schott (2008,Economic Policy) documents within-product unit-value dispersion along the developing-country export rise; the chart below captures the coarser across-section picture.

How concentrated are exporters?

The Herfindahl–Hirschman index across the 226 exporters answers whether the gains from three decades of globalization were diffuse or concentrated. Krugman’s new trade theory (1980 QJE; 2009 Nobel lecture in AER 99(3)) and Melitz’s (2003, Econometrica) “new new” firm-heterogeneity framework jointly predict that, with scale economies and selection, liberalization can raise the dispersion of country market shares; Hanson (2012, JEP) documents China’s outsized role in that reshuffling.

Who actually moves the goods

The HHI in Figure 4 is a scalar; the underlying league table is where the story lives. Fifteen countries account for roughly 60.6% of total world merchandise exports in 2024. That concentration is not a statistical artefact. It is the working geography of modern trade, and it is the set of reporters who define the HHI, the sectoral shares, and most of the bilateral flows on the rest of this site.

Who grew, who shrank: 2019–2024 export growth

The level view in Figure 5 is a snapshot; the next question is who is accelerating and who is stalling. The five-year window 2019–2024 spans the COVID trade collapse, the 2021–22 rebound, the Russia-Ukraine commodity shock, and the US-China tariff rounds. Because it brackets a full supply-chain dislocation and recovery, it separates structural winners from countries whose terms of trade moved against them. We compute cumulative nominal-USD export growth for every reporter with at least USD 100M of exports in both years, then split the sample at the cross-country median.

The network behind the league table

The top-15 reporters in Figure 5 do not trade in isolation; most of their volume is carried on a few thick corridors. The figure below plots the top-30 country pairs by flow in 2024 as a directed network over country centroids. Edge thickness is proportional to the bilateral value; thicker edges carry more trade. This is the “core plumbing” view that Antràs (2020, JIE) calls the backbone of the global production network.

Top partners by flow

The network view in Figure 6 shows geography and clustering; the ranked bar view below shows how much each of the top-20 bilateral corridors actually carries. The top pair alone is typically larger than the 20th by more than an order of magnitude, which is the fat-tail that makes aggregate trade metrics so sensitive to a small number of relationships. Head & Mayer (2014, Handbook of International Economics) call this the “distance-weighted mass” concentration that any gravity estimate has to fit.

How concentrated is each big exporter’s basket?

Figure 4 measures concentration across countries (one HHI per year on country market shares). The complementary read is concentration within each leader’s basket: an HHI computed across HS6 product shares of that country’s own export portfolio. The two HHIs do not have to move together: the world can stay diffuse across countries while individual baskets concentrate (commodity-dependence) or diversify (machinery upgrading). The contrast separates broad manufacturers from single-product commodity exporters in the same league table. Hesse (2008, World Bank Growth Commission WP 21) and Lederman & Maloney (2007, Natural Resources, Neither Curse nor Destiny) both flag within-basket HHI as the cleaner first-pass measure of export-base brittleness.

The 200-year frame

The BACI window starts in 1995, but the question of whether today is exceptionally globalized only makes sense against the long sweep. TRADHIST (Fouquin & Hugot 2016, CEPII) reconstructs bilateral trade and macro aggregates for 88–147 countries from 1827 to 2014. Two globalization peaks emerge: the Pax Britannica era before 1914 and the post-1980 hyperglobalization. O’Rourke & Williamson (1999) Globalization and History and Findlay & O’Rourke (2007) Power and Plenty are the standard references for interpreting these arcs.

What is here

Seven pictures, one reading. World merchandise trade rose from $5.07T in 1995 to $22.83T in 2024 in current USD; the globalization ratio plateaued after 2008 but the level remains historically unprecedented on the TRADHIST frame; composition shifted toward machinery & electronics and away from raw commodities over thirty years; the concentration index barely moved despite China’s rise, because China replaced mass in a tail that was already long. For country-level detail, see /country/<iso3>; for product detail, /product/<hs6>; for near-real-time reads, /monthly.