Dual-use items are goods and technologies that have both civil and military uses. In the European Union their export is controlled and governed by an EC regulation since the year 2000. Its implementation, in terms of legislation, export authorisations and customs controls, remains the responsibility of each of the 27 Member States. For reasons linked to the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, competition in trade and free market rules, it is ‘desirable to achieve a uniform and consistent application of controls throughout the EU in order to promote EU and international security and to provide a level playing field for EU exporters’ – as stated in the regulation.
How far is the goal? Hard to say since no official data about the trade of dual-use items are shared among Member States, nor with the European Commission, Directorate General Trade, in charge of the dual-use regulation.
This report presents sources of generic, statistical trade data and a methodology to create an approximate picture of extra-EU trade flows of dual-use items. The data stem from goods’ declarations made by exporters to customs authorities as part of the normal export process for any commodity. The data are collected at national level, aggregated by categories of goods, and made public in web data services on trade. The data are referred to a commodity classification system, the Combined Nomenclature (CN), in use for customs controls in the EU. However the CN is only indirectly related to dual-use items. Correspondence tables exist that map dual-use items to CN descriptors, but they introduce approximations in the description of the items traded. For this reason the CN trade data provide, in the general case, upper bounds to the real trade volume of dual-use items.
Notwithstanding this limitation, the CN trade data may prove useful for a number of issues and assessments needed for export controls. One example is presented in this report. It concerns the estimation of extra-EU trade flows for dual-use chemicals under consideration for inclusion in a Union General Export Authorisation (EU GEA). EU GEAs define a framework valid in all EU Members States whereby the export of selected categories of dual-use items to specific destination countries with a low-risk of diversion is automatically authorised. An analysis of the volume of exports based on CN trade data allows estimating the impact expected for EU exporters by including given dual-use chemicals in an EU GEA.
To facilitate the estimation of extra-EU trade flows, it is proposed to develop a dedicated Information Technology tool merging lists of export-controlled items with correspondence tables of CN items’ descriptors and export data. Such a tool can become a design and evaluation instrument to assess the economic impact of alternative policy options to regulate the European dual-use trade.JRC.E.8-Nuclear securit
