Who Every Country Trades With

The biggest trade relationships on Earth

The largest single flows of goods between two countries, by export value. Trade runs both ways, so a pair can appear twice — what a country sells is counted separately from what it buys.

Why exports and imports never quite add up, why the same shipment is counted twice, and how these threads are drawn is worth a couple of minutes:

Trade flows by country

The largest traders lead. Open a country for its top export and import partners — who it sells to, who it buys from, and how much.

The same trade, coloured by country

These arcs show who trades with whom. To see the totals painted onto the countries themselves — who sells most, who buys most, who runs a surplus — the companion choropleth maps use the same UN Comtrade figures.

About this data

Flows come from the UN Comtrade database, the United Nations’ official record of international merchandise trade. For each reporting country we take its bilateral goods trade with every partner for 2023(all commodities) and draw the largest as arcs from the reporter to each partner, sized by value. A country appears once it has reported; the newest and smallest economies file late or not at all, so this is close to — not all of — world trade. Exports are valued FOB (free on board, at the border of the seller) and imports CIF(including the cost of shipping and insurance), which is why the world’s imports always tot up to more than its exports even though every export is someone’s import. A small share of each country’s trade — goods logged against UN groupings, “areas not elsewhere specified” or tiny territories without a country outline — cannot be pinned to a point on the globe, so it is left off the arcs rather than invented; each country page shows how much of its trade is drawn. We refresh the snapshot once a year rather than calling UN Comtrade on every visit. This is a map of connections, not a ranking.