Exploring the use of trade data to support verification activities

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, both of statistical and transactional nature, on all categories of goods. 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 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 assist the verification of additional protocol and nuclear material transfer declarations, 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, data provided and accessibility. It 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.JRC.G.8-Nuclear securit