Balance of Payments trade in goods at Statistics Canada: Expanding geographic detail to 27 principal trading partners

Beginning in November 2014, International Trade in goods data will be provided on a Balance of Payments (BOP) basis for additional country detail. In publishing this data, BOP-based exports to and imports from 27 countries, referred to as Canada’s Principal Trading Partners (PTPs), will be highlighted for the first time. BOP-based trade in goods data will be available for countries such as China and Mexico, Brazil and India, South Korea, and our largest European Union trading partners, in response to substantial demand for information on these countries in recent years. Until now, Canada’s geographical trading patterns have been examined almost exclusively through analysis of Customs-based trade data. Moreover, BOP trade in goods data for these countries will be available alongside the now quarterly Trade in Services data as well as annual Foreign Direct Investment data for many of these Principal Trading Partners, facilitating country-level international trade and investment analysis using fully comparable data. The objective of this article is to introduce these new measures. This note will first walk users through the key BOP concepts, most importantly the concept of change in ownership. This will serve to familiarize analysts with the Balance of Payments framework for analyzing country-level data, in contrast to Customs-based trade data. Second, some preliminary analysis will be reviewed to illustrate the concepts, with provisional estimates for BOP-based trade with China serving as the principal example. Lastly, we will outline the expansion of quarterly trade in services to generate new estimates of trade for the PTPs and discuss future work in trade statistics.