Template-Type: ReDIF-Paper 1.0 Author-Name: Sebastian Bustos Author-Email: sebastian_bustos@hks.harvard.edu Author-Workplace-Name: Center for International Development at Harvard University Author-Name: Ellie Jackson Author-Workplace-Name: Harvard's Growth Lab Author-Name: David Torun Author-Name: Brendan Leonard Author-Workplace-Name: Harvard's Growth Lab Author-Name: Nil Tuzcu Author-Workplace-Name: Harvard's Growth Lab Author-Name: Piotr Lukaszuk Author-Name: Annie White Author-Workplace-Name: Harvard's Growth Lab Author-Name: Ricardo Hausmann Author-Email: ricardo_hausmann@harvard.edu Author-Workplace-Name: Harvard's Growth Lab Author-Person: pha552 Author-Name: Muhammed A. Yildirim Author-Workplace-Name: Center for International Development at Harvard University Title: Tackling Discrepancies in Trade Data: The Harvard Growth Lab International Trade Datasets Abstract: Bilateral trade data informs foreign and domestic policy decisions, serves as a growth indicator, determines tariffs, and is the basis for financial and investment decisions for corporations. Accurate trade data translates into better decision-making. However, the raw bilateral trade data reported by UN Comtrade suffer from two structural problems: reporting differences between country partners and countries reporting in different product classification systems, which require product-level harmonization to compare data across countries. In this paper, we address these challenges by combining a mirroring technique and a data-driven concordance method. Mirroring reconciles importer and exporter differences by imputing country reliability scores and applying a weighted country-pair average to calculate the estimated trade value. We harmonize product classifications across vintages by calculating conversion weights that reflect a product’s market share. The resulting publicly available datasets mitigate issues in raw trade statistics, reducing reporting inconsistencies while maintaining product-level granularity across six decades. Creation-Date: 2025-07 Keywords: Trade, Foreign Direct Investment Number: 251 Handle: RePEc:glh:wpfacu:251 File-Url: https://growthlab.hks.harvard.edu/sites/projects.iq.harvard.edu/files/2025-07-glwp-251-tackling-discrepancies-in-trade-data.pdf File-Format: application/pdf