untrader

Installation

Install the package from the github repository.

devtools::install_github('datapumpernickel/untrader')

Authentication

To query data from the Comtrade API, you will need to make an account at https://comtradeplus.un.org/. Once you made your account, you need set up a primary and secondary key in your profile at the UN website. See their wiki for details (Scroll until you reach UN Comtrade API Management).

Once you have your API key, you need to make the API key available to untrader. For this, you can either set your key through the interactive function and save it for the current session, or set it permanently in your environment.

Set it in current session

When prompted, put the API key in.

untrader::set_primary_comtrade_key()

You can test that the API key is correctly stored, by trying to call the following function. Beware not to evaluate the following function in a markdown document you intend on sharing, as you might leak your API key.

untrader::get_primary_comtrade_key()

Permanently setting your API key

You can also permanently set your API key either for the current project or your whole user environment. For this you need to edit your .Renviron file (see here for more info on environment file and variables).

You can use usethis::edit_r_environ() to edit your .Renviron file. The variable name that get_comtrade_data() will be looking for is: COMTRADE_PRIMARY and you need to name it accordingly.

If for some reason, you want to set the API key manually, you can also pass it on to the get_comtrade_data() function with the parameter primary_key.

Getting data from Comtrade

When getting data from comtrade, you will need to set values for most parameters, as there is no sensitive default for some of them.

get_comtrade_data()

If you are for example interested in the exports of “Beer made from malt”, HS code 2203 from Germany to Austria, in the year 2010, you would use the following code.

get_comtrade_data(frequency =  'A',
                   commodity_classification = 'HS',
                   commodity_code = '2203',
                   flow_direction = 'export',
                   reporter = "DEU",
                   partner = 'AUT',
                   start_date = 2010,
                   end_date = 2010,
                   verbose = T,
                  process = T)