BACI

BACI is a harmonized international trade database built from UN Comtrade records, reconciling the mismatches between what exporters report shipping and what importers report receiving.

BACI takes the raw international trade records in the UN’s Comtrade database and reconciles them, since an exporting country and the country receiving its goods frequently report different figures for what should be the same shipment, due to shipping lags, valuation differences, and reporting errors. BACI applies a consistent method to produce a single, harmonized trade flow between each pair of countries for each product.

The result is a cleaner dataset for researchers and analysts who need to study global trade in a specific commodity without individually reconciling every mismatched pair of records themselves. It is built and maintained by CEPII, a French research institute, and is widely used in academic and policy research into commodity and manufactured goods trade at the country and product level, following the same HS code classification as its source data.