🚢 World Bank Trade Data Scraper: Imports & Exports

Overview

The World Bank Trade Data Scraper is a pay-per-result Apify actor that pulls bilateral import and export trade values between any two countries, broken down by product, straight from the World Bank WITS TradeStats database. Cover India, China, the US, the EU and 200+ economies going back years, and export clean, structured JSON, CSV or Excel.

Built lean and HTTP-only against the public WITS backend. Ideal for supply-chain intelligence, market-entry research, policy analysis, and AI agents that need real trade data.

✅ No API key | ✅ No login | ✅ Free tier on first runs | ✅ MCP-ready for AI agents

Features

Bilateral trade values between any reporter country and one or many partner countries. Multi-year series across a chosen year range in a single run. Product breakdown by the standard 29-group WITS classification or a specific HS or SITC code. Both flows returned in one dataset: imports and exports for each reporter, partner, and year. Same output whether you consume it via CSV, JSON, Excel, API, or MCP tool call.

How it works

The WITS data is public but the raw SDMX responses are dense and awkward to parse into usable rows. This actor does the resolution and flattening for you. Reporter, partner, year, flow, product, indicator, and value all live at the top level, so you get analysis-ready records without wrangling XML.

Feed it an ISO3 reporter code (USA, IND, CHN), one or more partners (or WLD for the world total), a year range, and optionally a specific product code. It returns one flat record per reporter, partner, year, flow, and product combination.

🧾 Input configuration

{
  "reporter": "USA",
  "partners": ["CHN"],
  "yearFrom": 2020,
  "yearTo": 2021,
  "flows": ["imports", "exports"],
  "productCode": "all",
  "maxResults": 1000
}

📤 Output format

{
  "reporter_code": "USA",
  "reporter": "United States",
  "partner_code": "CHN",
  "partner": "China",
  "year": "2021",
  "flow": "imports",
  "product_code": "50-63_TextCloth",
  "product_name": "Textiles and Clothing",
  "indicator_code": "MPRT-TRD-VL",
  "indicator": "Import Trade Value (US$ Thousand)",
  "value_usd_thousand": 37466548.817,
  "scraped_at": "2026-07-15T04:17:12.652Z"
}

This is a real record captured from a live run of the actor (US imports of textiles and clothing from China, 2021).

Every trade record contains these fields:

Field	Description
🌐 reporter_code	ISO3 code of the reporting country
🏳️ reporter	Name of the reporting country
🤝 partner_code	ISO3 code of the trade partner country
🏴 partner	Name of the trade partner country
🗓️ year	Year of the trade data
🔁 flow	Trade flow direction (imports or exports)
🔢 product_code	WITS product-section code (e.g. 50-63_TextCloth), or a specific HS/SITC code when requested
📦 product_name	Human readable product name
🏷️ indicator_code	WITS indicator code (e.g. MPRT-TRD-VL)
📊 indicator	Human readable indicator name, including its unit
💵 value_usd_thousand	Trade value in thousands of US dollars
🕒 scraped_at	ISO timestamp of capture

💼 Common use cases

Supply chain and sourcing intelligence Map which products flow between two economies and at what value. Identify major trade partners for a product category before committing to a supplier.

Market entry and expansion research Size a target market by examining a country's import mix by product. Compare landed trade values across candidate origin countries.

Economics and policy analysis Assemble multi-year bilateral trade series for modeling and forecasting. Track structural shifts (e.g. India's electronics imports) across a decade.

AI research agents and dashboards Give an assistant real trade data so it can answer "how much machinery did the US import from China in 2021?" Build trade flow charts and dashboards on clean rows.

🚀 Getting started

1. Open the actor and click Try for free.
2. Enter a reporter country as an ISO3 code (e.g. USA, IND, CHN, DEU, GBR).
3. Add partner countries (ISO3, or WLD for the world total).
4. Set From year and To year, choose flows (imports, exports), and a product code (all for the 29-group breakdown, or a specific HS or SITC code).
5. Click Start and download results as JSON, CSV, Excel, or via API or MCP.

FAQ

Do I need a World Bank API key? No. There is no API key and no login. Enter country codes and run.

What country codes do I use? Three letter ISO3 codes for reporter and partners (e.g. USA, IND, CHN). Use WLD for the world total.

Can I get a specific product instead of the whole breakdown? Yes. Set Product code to a specific HS or SITC code, or leave it as all for the standard 29 product section groups.

What years are available? WITS trade data typically runs through the prior year or two. Set From year and To year accordingly.

How am I charged? Pay per result: you pay only for trade data points actually delivered, and a free tier covers first runs. Blocked, empty, or failed queries are never charged.

Can I use it inside an AI agent? Yes. It is exposed as an MCP tool. See below.

Use in Claude, ChatGPT & any MCP agent

https://mcp.apify.com/?tools=themineworks/global-trade-data

Or call it programmatically with the Apify client:

import { ApifyClient } from 'apify-client';

const client = new ApifyClient({ token: 'YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN' });
const run = await client.actor('themineworks/global-trade-data').call({
  reporter: 'USA',
  partners: ['CHN'],
  yearFrom: 2020,
  yearTo: 2021,
  flows: ['imports', 'exports'],
});
const { items } = await client.dataset(run.defaultDatasetId).listItems();
console.log(items);

🛠️ Related themineworks scrapers

• Google Trends Scraper Pro: cross reference trade flows with search demand.
• Google News Scraper: pull recent trade and policy news for context.
• Crunchbase Companies Scraper: identify major players in a category before analysing their trade.
• RAG Website Crawler: turn any docs or reports site into embedding ready Markdown for an AI copilot.

Questions or need a custom field set? Reach out through the Apify profile.