World Trade Data: Can They Help Safeguards Vertification Acttivities?

As part of a European Commission Support Programme Task to the IAEA, a survey of world trade data from open source has been conducted. A catalogue was produced to cover services offering data on trade on all categories of goods, both of statistical and transactional nature. Services on statistical data have a worldwide coverage and are provided, often for free, by international and governmental organizations, and statistical offices. Services on trade transactions may have a national or multi-national scope and are typically provided by private companies. The survey was motivated by the hypothesis that trade databases may be useful to support IAEA verification activities. Trade data may provide insights to support the verification of additional protocol declarations and nuclear material transfers as well as give indications of possible undeclared activities. Since trade data is indexed in data services by the Harmonized System (HS) nomenclature of goods, a prerequisite to use this type of data is to ¿map¿ items of interest to safeguards verification with HS categories. The paper reviews services available on world trade data with an emphasis on geographical and temporal coverage, type of data provided and accessibility. It then addresses the challenging task of correlating categories of items of interest and HS codes. The paper concludes on some possible uses of trade data for nuclear verification purposes.

VERSINO Cristina;  CHATELUS Renaud;  COJAZZI Giacomo;  CONTINI Franca;  TARVAINEN Matti;  TSOIS Aris; 

2010-12-23

Institute for Nuclear Materials Management (INMM)

JRC58806

https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC58806,