Comparability of International Trade Statistics: Great Britain and Austria‐Hungary before World War I
M t -EASURING the extent of economic contact between two countries involves a great deal of statistical analysis of bilateral balance-of-payments returns. The most important aspect of such analysis is the measurement of trade relations between the two countries concerned, requiring the study of trade statistics. Trade statistics themselves are aggregations of discrete phenomena such as commercial transactions of independent merchants from two or more countries, involved in the sales, delivery, and purchase of a certain commodity moving across international borders. The only reliable sources for the estimation of the size, value, and quality of such transactions are the official government recordings of foreign trade. Each international trade transaction is recorded by two government bureaux, once as export and once as import, so that the same transaction, which is regarded and registered in state A as an export to B, is recorded in B's official statement as an import from A. The same procedure is repeated for each individual transaction in either direction, and the total volume of A's export to B becomes B's import from A, and vice versa. Consequently, one might expect that A's record on its export to B should roughly correspond to B's record on its import from A.2 Yet in fact such accord does not exist in most trade statistics of the past. Therefore, if bilateral trade analysis uses commercial statistics of either one or the other party, plausible results are relatively easily obtainable; but a comparison of the figures either for total trade or for individual items shows very considerable discrepancies and greatly complicates the picture. The following study, carried out mainly on trade statistics of Great Britain and Austria-Hungary during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attempts to analyse the reasons for the difficulties arising from the comparison of trading figures of two countries for mutual commercial relations.