Marissa Lahousse Blog #2

Marissa Lahousse

Economics 122

Professor Kassens

December 14, 2015

The program SAS puts the enormous amount of rows of UN Comtrade data into an easy visual form. From this program, you can analyze the trade between all of the nations in the world and draw inferences from it. One of the nations that caught my interest was Egypt. After analyzing the data, I have found that Egypt is a nation that relies heavily on importing products, and exports very little. This inference would mean that Egypt is a net importer. The main commodities that Egypt imports are mineral fuels, nuclear reactors, iron and steal, cereals, electrical commodities, and vehicles (SAS). In comparison, the top exported commodity is also mineral fuels, oils and distillation products (SAS). All of the other exported commodities are under $5 billion dollars, which is just pennies compared to the $50 billion dollars on exported mineral fuels.

In reviewing the imports and exported commodities, I also analyzed the trade balance between the nations that Egypt trades with. Starting with the 2008 dataset, the nation that imported the most commodities with Egypt was the United States. In 2010, there is a slight inward shift of imported commodities from the United States, and it looks like all of the nations are getting closer to a more equal trading pattern. However, in 2011 the United States imports are greatly increased again, causing a large divide between all of the other nations. In addition, between the 2010 and 2011 time period, Egypt starts to export commodities to India, which is their current second top exporting country that they trade to. In 2012, the United States commodities again are increased and China is moved to the top importer of commodities for Egypt. During the 2013 period, China continues to increase their imports while the other nations decrease their imports. In addition, the Russian Federation in this time period decreases their imported commodities by 50%. In reviewing data from the Observatory of economic complexity, the trade balance also shows that there has been a significant increasing gap between imported commodities and exported commodities. The OEC states that “As of 2013 Egypt had a negative trade balance of $33.1B in net imports. As compared to their trade balance in 1995 when they still had a negative trade balance of $10B in net imports” (OEC, n.d., p. 1).

The largest imported commodity is mineral fuels. This is interesting to me, as their largest exported commodity is mineral fuels as well. The data on OEC goes into more detail about the mineral fuels that are imported into Egypt. The largest percent of mineral fuels that are imported is refined petroleum, which accounts for 9.4% of all imported commodities (OEC, 2015). Second to that, petroleum gas accounts for the next largest portion of mineral fuels, and is 2.5% of the total imported commodities as well(OEC, 2015). Both of these programs provide an immense about of data analytics that can be used to analyze the trading patterns of every country in the world.

Resources

UN Comtrade Demo. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://www.sas.com/software/visual-analytics/demos/un-comtrade-basic.html

Observatory of Economic Complexity. (2015). Retrieved from http://atlas.media.mit.edu/en/profile/country/egy/