📊 OEC Economic Complexity Trade Scraper

🚀 Export international trade flows in seconds. Pull bilateral trade data for 231 countries, 5,000+ HS6 products, across 1995-2024, sourced from the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) at MIT.

The OEC Economic Complexity Trade Scraper queries the OEC public trade catalog (BACI HS6 and SITC4 product classifications) and returns 13 fields per record, including reporter and partner country names and IDs, year, product ID, product name, product breakdown level, raw and formatted trade value in USD, cube name, and dataset annotation. The OEC is one of the most cited open trade-data references in academic and policy research.

The catalog covers 231 countries, 5,000+ HS6 products (Harmonized System 6-digit), the historical SITC4 classification back to 1962, and bilateral flows for any country pair. Trade values run from 1995 to 2024 under BACI HS6, with SITC available 1962 to 2022.

🎯 Target Audience	💡 Primary Use Cases
Trade economists, supply-chain analysts, policy researchers, commodity traders, ESG analysts, journalists, sanctions compliance teams, M&A research	Bilateral flow analysis, supply-chain risk, comparative advantage models, sanctions impact, ESG product-origin audits, journalism investigations

📋 What the OEC Economic Complexity Trade Scraper does

Five workflows in a single run:

• 🌍 Country totals. Pull total exports for one reporter country in one year. Set productLevel: "none".
• 🤝 Bilateral flows. Specify both reporter and partner to get country-to-country trade values.
• 🛍️ Product breakdown. Switch productLevel to hs4, hs6, or sitc4 to decompose flows by product.
• 🔍 HS code filter. Add a numeric HS4 or HS6 code (e.g. 8542 for integrated circuits) to scope to one product family.
• 📆 Year selector. Any year from 1995 to 2024 (BACI HS6) or 1962 to 2022 (SITC).

Each record carries the year, the canonical OEC country IDs and human names for both reporter and partner, the product ID and name, the breakdown level, the raw trade value in USD, a formatted display value, the cube name, and the OEC dataset annotation.

💡 Why it matters: international trade data is fragmented across UN Comtrade, BACI, ITC Trade Map, and national customs feeds. Each has its own format, codes, and refresh cycle. The OEC unifies the most-cited dataset into a single queryable surface, and this Actor exports it as ready-to-load CSV, Excel, or JSON without writing a single parser.

📊 Data fields

Each record includes: cube, datasetName, partner, partnerId, productId, productLevel, productName, reporter, reporterId, scrapedAt, tradeValueUsd, tradeValueUsdFormatted, year. These field names come straight from the actor's dataset schema, so what you see here is what lands in your dataset.

🚀 How to use

1. 📝 Sign up. Create a free account with $5 credit (takes 2 minutes).
2. 🌐 Open the Actor. Go to the OEC Economic Complexity Trade Scraper page on the Apify Store.
3. 🎯 Set input. Pick a year, reporter, optionally a partner, set the productLevel, and set maxItems.
4. 🚀 Run it. Click Start and let the Actor pull the trade flows.
5. 📥 Download. Grab your results in the Dataset tab as CSV, Excel, JSON, or XML.

⏱️ Total time from signup to a downloaded dataset: 3-5 minutes. No coding required.

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💡 Pro Tip: browse the complete ParseForge collection for more reference-data scrapers.

⚠️ Disclaimer: this Actor is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the Observatory of Economic Complexity, MIT, or any of its contributors. All trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners. Only publicly available OEC trade data is collected.

🆘 Need Help?

If you hit a bug, have questions about setup, or need a scraper we haven't built yet, open our contact form or write to parseforge@protonmail.com. We also take on paid custom data projects.

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