Forecasting the 2026 Sector

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On this topic page, you can find data, visualizations, and research on historic and existing patterns of international trade, as well as conversations of their origins and impacts. SectionsAll our work on Trade & Globalization Among the most essential developments of the last century has been the combination of national economies into an international economic system.

One method to see this growth in the information is to track how exports and imports have changed over time. The chart here does this by showing the volume of world trade since 1800, changing the figures for inflation and indexing them to their 1800 worths.

The long-run data we provide here originates from the work of historians and other researchers who draw on historic sources such as archival customs records, early analytical yearbooks, and other main files. These historical estimates offer us a broad view of how international trade developed, however they are harder to upgrade, which is why not all charts (and not all series within some charts) extend to the present.

Measuring Performance in the 2026 Economy

What these long-run price quotes allow us to see is that globalization did not grow along a constant, constant path. Instead, it broadened in two significant waves. The chart listed below presents a compilation of available historical trade estimates, showing the development of world exports and imports as a share of global economic output. What is revealed is the "trade openness index".

As the chart shows, till 1800, there was a long period defined by constantly low international trade worldwide the index never ever exceeded 10% before 1800. Background: trade before the very first wave of globalizationBefore globalization took off, trade was driven mostly by colonialism.

Leonor Freire Costa, Nuno Palma, and Jaime Reis, who compiled and released historic price quotes, argue that trade, also in this period, had a significant positive influence on the economy.3 This then changed throughout the 19th century, when technological advances triggered a duration of marked growth in world trade the so-called "very first wave of globalization". This first wave came to an end with the start of World War I, when the decline of liberalism and the rise of nationalism led to a slump in global trade.

Measuring Success in the 2026 Economy

After World War II, trade started growing once again. This brand-new and continuous wave of globalization has seen international trade grow faster than ever in the past.

In the period 18301900, intra-European exports went from 1% of GDP to 10% of GDP, and this indicated that the relative weight of intra-European exports nearly doubled over the duration. Nevertheless, this process of European combination then collapsed greatly in the interwar duration. You can alter to a relative view and see the proportional contribution of each area to total Western European exports.

In addition, Western Europe then started to significantly trade with Asia, the Americas, and, to a smaller sized degree, Africa and Oceania. The next chart, using information from Broadberry and O'Rourke (2010 ), reveals another perspective on the integration of the global economy and plots the development of 3 indications measuring integration across various markets specifically items, labor, and capital markets.4 The signs in this chart are indexed, so they show changes relative to the levels of combination observed in 1900.

26 The around the world growth of trade after World War II was mostly possible because of reductions in deal expenses stemming from technological advances, such as the development of business civil air travel, the enhancement of performance in the merchant marines, and the democratization of the telephone as the main mode of interaction.

Standardizing Distributed Business Systems

The first wave of globalization was defined by inter-industry trade. In the second wave of globalization, we see a rise in intra-industry trade (i.e., the exchange of broadly comparable goods and services becoming more common).

The following visualization, from the UN World Advancement Report (2009 ), plots the portion of overall world trade that is accounted for by intra-industry trade, by type of products. As we can see, intra-industry trade has been going up for main, intermediate, and last goods.

You can modify the nations and regions picked; each nation tells a various story.7 The exact same historic sources also enable us to explore where countries sent their exports gradually. This breakdown by destination supplies a complementary view of globalization: not just did nations incorporate at different moments, but the partners they traded with likewise altered in various methods.

These figures are stemmed from modern-day trade records, customizeds data, and international databases. With this data, we can track existing patterns in trade volumes, trade composition, and trading partners. (You can learn more about information sources and measurement problems at the end of this page.) Trade openness (exports plus imports as a share of gdp) shows how large a country's cross-border circulations are relative to the size of its domestic economy.

International trade is much smaller sized relative to the domestic economy in the United States than in almost all European countries. This is partly explained by the big volume of trade that happens within the European Union. If you press the play button on the map, you can see how trade openness has altered over time across all nations.