Trade in a Bottle

Trade in a Bottle: Identifying Import Bottlenecks in International Trade is an analytical tool created at Wroclaw University of Economics and Business in Poland by dr Szymon Mazurek to identify extreme import dependencies in international trade. It analyses bilateral trade flows to find cases where a single source country accounts for a dominant share of a country’s imports of a specific product.

An extreme import bottleneck is defined as a trade flow where:

• A single partner country supplies ≥ 80% of total imports of a given HS product code, and
• The total import value is ≥ 10,000,000 USD.

The tool provides several analytical views:

• World of Extreme Bottlenecks — a summary table showing the number of bottlenecks per country, indicating how many of these are associated with countries in the Danger Zone (whatever that means to the user, for example, those affected by military conflict) and how many relate to Critical Goods (whatever that means to the user, who is free to decide which goods are considered critical).
• Extreme Import Bottlenecks — detailed extreme bottleneck records for a selected country with Danger Zone and Critical Goods numbers as well.
• Country Matrix — a parametric matrix showing bottleneck counts for a selected country across different share and value thresholds with more detailed data on Danger Zone and Critical Goods import flows.

Users can define their own Danger Zone (a list of partner countries of concern) and Critical Goods (a list of HS product codes of strategic importance). These lists are stored locally in the browser and are used to highlight relevant bottlenecks across all views.