comflow is an interactive world map of global bilateral trade flows for the largest hard commodities. Each animated great-circle route connects an exporting country to an importing country; its colour identifies the commodity and its width and brightness scale with the trade's value or weight for the selected year.
Sixteen commodities are covered: crude oil, refined petroleum, petroleum gas (LNG), gold, iron ore, coal, copper ore, refined copper, bauxite, unwrought aluminium, ferro-alloys, nickel, zinc, lead, tin and potash. You can toggle any commodity, switch between trade value (US dollars) and weight (tonnes), and step through the years 2022 to 2024.
The underlying data is BACI, the CEPII international-trade database that reconciles United Nations Comtrade records into consistent bilateral flows. Figures are gross trade, so goods that transit a hub (such as crude oil re-exported through Rotterdam) are recorded by shipment country rather than country of production.
global hard-commodity trade flows