Reconciliation of Forest Product Trade Data

Kornai, G. (1985). Reconciliation of Forest Product Trade Data. IIASA Working Paper. IIASA, Laxenburg, Austria: WP-85-048

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Abstract

The work reported here was done in close collaboration between the Forest Sector Project of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). The reasons for this joint effort were twofold. As far as IIASA is concerned, the incentive was our need for a consistent and full-scale historical data set on bilateral trade flows to be used in the global model. The FAO had several interests for participating in this analysis. First, to gain a fast computerized access to the very large UN data bank on trade in forest products. Then to carry out a series of comparisons between the UN and the FAO data, and, finally, to generate a set of standardized trade matrices. It is expected that the results will provide the basis for further validation of FAO data.

Both the aims of IIASA and of FAO require an algorithm for "reconciling" the data of different origins with each other. This algorithm can then be used to calculate a set of trade matrices that may be closer to reality. The importance of such matrices is evident: past trade and other economic analyses having been based on any one of the various original trade matrices led to conclusions of a somewhat diverse and conflicting nature, reflecting sometimes the specific features - and errors - of the data set. The reconciliation method reported here produces historically consistent trade matrices. Even though some rules of the algorithm may be questioned, it is believed that the simplicity of our procedure makes it easier to use than many of the other known and more sophisticated data reconciliation techniques.

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