TradePulse — glossary

Name: TradePulse live feed
Creator: TradePulse

Plain-language definitions of the terms used across TradePulse (World Bank).

Output and income

Gross Domestic Product (GDP): The total market value of all goods and services a country produces in a period, usually a year. The most common single measure of the size of an economy.
GDP per capita: GDP divided by population — average output per person. A rough proxy for living standards that allows like-for-like comparison between large and small economies, but says nothing about distribution.
Nominal vs. real: Nominal values are measured at current (day-of) prices; real values are adjusted for inflation (constant prices) so changes reflect volume, not rising prices. Real figures are used to compare output over time.
Constant prices: Values expressed in the prices of a fixed base year to strip out inflation. The basis for real GDP and real growth, as opposed to current-price (nominal) figures.

Exports and imports: Exports are goods and services a country sells abroad; imports are those it buys from abroad. The building blocks of every trade statistic.
Trade balance: Exports minus imports. A positive balance is a trade surplus; a negative one is a trade deficit. A description of flows, not a judgment on economic health.
Current account: The broadest measure of a country’s transactions with the world: the trade balance plus cross-border income (wages, investment returns) and transfers (remittances, aid).
Tariff: A tax a government places on imported goods, set as a rate (a percentage of value) that varies by product and trading partner. It raises the price of affected imports.

Bilateral trade flow: The value of trade moving from one specific country to another, recorded direction by direction (as in UN Comtrade). Aggregate trade is the sum of these flows across all partners.
Purchasing-power parity (PPP): A way of comparing economies that adjusts for differences in price levels between countries, valuing output at a common set of prices rather than at market exchange rates. Often preferred for comparing living standards.
Market exchange rate: The rate at which currencies actually trade, used to convert values for cross-border transactions. An alternative to PPP that can understate or overstate an economy’s size relative to its price level.
Revisions and lags: Economic data is released after the period it covers (often quarterly or annually) and updated as fuller information arrives. Early estimates are provisional and can change meaningfully.