Two Countries Counted The Same Ships. They Got Different Answers.

When a ship leaves China for Germany, two countries write down what is on it.

China writes down what left. Germany writes down what arrived.

It is the same ship. So the two numbers should match.

China says it sent 116.23 billion dollars of goods in 2022.

Germany says it got 207.81 billion.

It Is Not Just Those Two

I looked at 2,600 pairs of countries. Both sides wrote down a number for each one.

The middle pair disagreed by 31.15 per cent.

2,089 pairs disagreed by more than a tenth. 894 disagreed by more than half.

And 442 pairs disagreed by more than double. One side said at least twice what the other said.

Some Of It Is Boring

There is a dull reason for part of this.

When a country writes down what left, it counts the goods at the dock. No shipping. No insurance.

When a country writes down what arrived, it adds the shipping and the insurance on top.

So the arriving number should be a bit bigger. That is normal.

Some countries publish both kinds of number. On those 703 pairs, I compared like with like.

The gap only fell from 31.15 per cent to 22.38 per cent.

So shipping explains about a quarter of it. Nothing explains the rest.

It Goes Both Ways

If people were hiding goods, the gap would lean one way. It does not.

Saudi Arabia says it sent China 9.96 billion. China says it got 78.05 billion. China says much more.

The Netherlands says it sent Germany 187.85 billion. Germany says it got 114.19 billion. Here the sender says more.

That second one has a reason. Lots of goods land at Rotterdam and then drive on somewhere else. The Netherlands counts them going out. Germany never counts them coming in.

Some Countries Match Better Than Others

Germany is closest to its partners. They differ by about 9.64 per cent.

Saudi Arabia is furthest. Its partners differ by about 291.97 per cent.

That is 30.3 times as far apart.

Add It All Up And It Cannot Be True

Every ship that leaves somewhere arrives somewhere.

So if you add up everything all these countries say they sent, and everything they say they got, the two totals have to be the same.

They say they sent 21.43 trillion dollars.

They say they got 22.14 trillion.

One Country Did Not Even Match Itself

Before comparing any two countries, I checked each one against its own total.

Each country writes one big number for everything it bought. It also writes a number for each country it bought from. Adding up the small ones should give the big one.

For 103 out of 104, it did.

Dominican Rep. said 26.76 billion in total. Its own smaller numbers added up to 28.88 billion.

Three Things I Cannot Tell You

A gap is not proof of cheating. Goods that pass through a third country get the wrong home written on them. A ship that leaves in December and lands in January sits in two different years. And each country ignores tiny parcels at a different size.

The like-for-like number only covers 703 of the 2,600 pairs, because most countries only publish one kind of number. So I keep it separate instead of mixing it in.

And this is 2022, one year, on purpose. Recent years keep getting corrected, so a gap measured on them would mostly be measuring the corrections.