Over the last few years, a growing concern developed around the trade of equipment designed for nuclear use and nuclear-related dual-use items that may be diverted to non-peaceful uses. Trade data sources and tools presented hereafter can enhance understanding of nuclear related trade from different perspectives.
One perspective is nuclear safeguards. Since 2007, the Joint Research Centre has been supporting the IAEA in finding and evaluating collections of open source data on trade. We identified, and documented in a catalogue of trade data, sources stemming from declarations made by importers and exporters to customs authorities. Customs data are collected nationally, processed and published in transactional or aggregated formats by decision of individual States. Bringing these data together results in a large collection that creates a global geographical view on trade, covers all commodities, and reports trade in quantitative form over several years. The data are retrieved by Harmonised System (HS) codes, the taxonomy of goods designed and maintained by the World Customs Organization. HS codes introduce approximations in the description of the trade making the data of no immediate use to safeguards. Their use requires first mapping items of interest to safeguards verifications to HS codes. To this goal, correspondence tables have been developed by trade analysts and experts of the Harmonised System. To make these tables easy-to-use, we have designed and developed a software tool named The Big Table (TBT) which supports: (a) searching a collection of reference documents relevant to nuclear trade (legal documents and handbooks); (b) selecting items of interest to specific safeguards verifications; (c) mapping items to HS codes by means of correspondence tables. These steps are preliminary to data retrieval from sources on trade described above. These data sources and TBT are currently in use at IAEA¿s Trade and Technology Analysis Unit, for safeguards purposes.
Other perspective uses of trade data pertain to the area of export controls. Potential uses include the estimation of trade flows of controlled items to inform the design of export control policies, as well as verifications on compliance with export controls regulations.
In this paper we present firstly a collection of data sources on global trade. The paper will then tackle in some detail the first perspective, i.e. the use of trade data to support safeguards with a focus on the TBT software tool for nuclear trade analysis. Other perspectives on the use of trade data will then be briefly outlined.JRC.E.9-Nuclear security (Ispra
