Selecting Products

Selected products are those for which you would like to see individual (or aggregated) trade flows.

Click on << Select >> to display the product selection panel

Elements of the Product Selection panel

The product selection panel is composed of 3 main areas

• The Product Search Area
• The nomenclature selection list allows choosing the nomenclature you want to use for selecting product categories.
• The product selection area is where you actually make your product selection.

Product selection always starts by choosing a Nomenclature. Then you can select products, product categories or product groups within the selected nomenclature using different modes of selection. Note that you can select products from different nomenclatures in the same query.

Selecting a Nomenclature

The first step in any product selection is to choose a nomenclature. Each nomenclature has its own product structure and level of details. Nomenclatures can be categorized into two groups:

• UN COMTRADE's native nomenclatures: these are the ones used in UN COMTRADE to store and organize information, namely SITC (revision 1, 2 and 3) and HS (1988-92, 1996 and 2002).
• WITS derived nomenclatures: these are nomenclatures included in WITS for which information is not natively reported in UN COMTRADE but to which information are converted by using the concordance files.

For any selected reporter and time period, your query will return results only if products are available in UN COMTRADE for the selected nomenclature, or if a concordance table exists between a native nomenclature and the selected derived nomenclature. For example, no results will be returned in HS 2002 if you select any year prior to 2002. The reason is that the concordance files do not convert HS 2002 codes to nomenclature files that existed prior to HS 2002. However, there may be concordance files converting HS 2002 to previous nomenclatures

To select a nomenclature:

1. Open the Nomenclature dropdown list;
2. Click on the desired nomenclature.

The product classification corresponding to the selected nomenclature is displayed in the product selection tree, the related product clusters displayed in the cluster selection box and the standard and your product groups in the corresponding selection boxes:

Products can be selected using through five modes of selection you choose from the product selection area titled Select product by:

• Search;
• Items;
• Product Selection Tree;
• Clusters;
• Aggregates;

Note: If you click on << Modify >> while modifying a query you will get an alert message Click OK to overwrite. Click Cancel to give new name. If you click OK then the selection for the existing query is changed and if you click Cancel you will be provided with a screen to rename the query with a new Query Name and Query Description .If you clicked Cancel by mistake you can hit the Cancel button in the new screen and not rename the query.

Next: Select Products by Item

---

WITS Online Help

The World Bank, 2010