Trade by Industry

Question

A UBC doctoral student is doing research on industries and wants summary information on Canadian bilateral trade with different countries by industry classification, not by the usual commodity classification.

The Statistics Canada-supplied data on Strategis' Trade Data Online has this for recent years using the NAICS classification and back to 1990 with the SIC classification. She needs further statistics for the period 1980-1989 to match some other work she is doing. She recognizes that she may have to do some manual work of matching commodities with industries. A note on the Trade Data Online site notes that the matching represents "a crude estimation of industry trade and is susceptible to errors." It also states the following:

"In an effort to quantify industry trade, Statistics Canada associates the exported commodity's Harmonized System (HS) code with a NAICS code using internal concordances."

CANSIM and every other source I have checked present import and export data by commodity, not by industry.

Since the data are originally from Statistics Canada I volunteered to put the question to the source. Is there anywhere to find this industry-related trade data, or to get access to the internal concordances noted above?

Answer

Trade data is available from 1980 to 1989 using the SIC classification system. However, it is only available as a custom request.

The US versions of the NAICS-HS concordances, for exports and for imports, can be downloaded from:
http://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/reference/codes/index.html#concordance