Metadata: Import and export of goods

Source

Institute of National Accounts (INR), processed by Flanders Investment and Trade and Statistics Flanders

Definitions

Import and export: foreign trade statistics are defined according to the Community concept. They refer to the crossing of goods across national borders. Imports concern goods that enter the Flemish Region from abroad. Exports relate to goods that leave the Flemish Region for abroad. The value of the goods is the value at the Belgian border. This value includes both for imports and exports, the price ‘ex-factory’ of the merchandise, plus the costs for transport and insurance up to the Belgian border, but without taxes and subsidies. Exports are regionalized according to the region where the last added value was realised. Conversely, imports are regionalized according to the region where the first added value takes place.

Asian Tigers: South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Neighbouring countries: Germany, the Netherlands, France.

BRIC countries: Brazil, Russia, India and China.

EU13 countries: Poland, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Cyprus, Malta, Romania, Bulgaria and Croatia.

EU14 countries: Netherlands, France, Germany, Luxembourg, Ireland, Austria, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. Belgium is part of the EU14, but is not included in the export and import figures because the Flemish Region is part of Belgium.

Next 11 countries: Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, South Korea, Mexico, Nigeria, Philippines, Pakistan, Turkey and Vietnam.

Current prices: prices for the year observed, not adjusted for inflation.

Remarks on quality

Extra-community trade, i.e. trade with countries outside the European Union (EU), is recorded on the basis of the customs documents for the Extrastat system. For trade with EU Member States (intra-community trade), the Instrastat system serves as a source, to which more than 17,000 Belgian companies report directly. This concerns companies that register more than 1,000,000 euro of shipments and/or more than 400,000 euro of imports from EU Member States on an annual basis.

Intra-community trade is estimated on the basis of a constant sample. In addition, there is an estimate based on VAT declarations, among other things for companies below the Instrastat threshold. The main disadvantage of the INR foreign trade statistics is that intangible service activities are not included (this should not be confused with tertiary sectors: for example, physical trade transactions are included here).

In the October 2021 version, the INR had to correct a number of errors in the declarations, making limited adjustments to the figures for the distribution between the regions in particular. This quality control continued since then and led to revisions for the whole of 2021.

In September 2022, the INR made a minor revision to the figures for 2019, 2020 and 2021.

References

Flanders Investment and Trade: Flemish import and export figures(opens in new window)

Institute of National Accounts (INR): Foreign trade(opens in new window)

To the statistics(opens in new window)