ForeignTrade Data of the Soviet Union with CMEA

This Database was gathered for the book: Erik Radisch, Der Rat für Gegenseitige Wirtschaftshilfe als Konsensimperium (Stuttgart 2022). In order to ease the reading of this book and facilitate the work of historians with published but not processed data about foreign trade (exports and imports) within CMEA within the period 1946-1966, I have decided to provide the reader with this database. The data was double checked by third persons. The Database might still, however, contain minor errors, although every effort has been made to correct them. The database is the source publication. Therefore, it includes the raw data without any interpretation or analytical research from the author. The data was collected by the author from Vnešnjaja torgovlja SSSR. statističeskij sbornik 1918-1966 (Moscow, 1967). The data relates to the six CMEA members (the GDR, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria) except Albania. Unfortunately, the source book does not contain any information on Albania’s foreign trade, and I have not been able to locate declassified additional data to remedy this omission. Foreign trade with Albania was, however, by far the lowest. Foreign trade output presents nine positions of the official commodity nomenclature for foreign trade (see: Vnešnjaja torgovlja SSSR. statističeskij sbornik 1918-1966 (Moscow, 1967), p. XIIIf.). The nomenclature is very extensive. The subcategories which are relevant for the six chosen countries are included in the database (44 subcategories for exports and 43 sub-categories for imports). However, only the first digit of the coding system was included in the database for this work. The database consists of four tables: “ExportsCMEA” – Data on exports for nine official over-arching goods categories (with a further breakdown into subcategories) in thousand roubles and in amount of goods (in corresponding units of measure) for six CMEA countries “ImportsCMEA” - Data on imports for nine official over-arching goods categories (with a further breakdown into subcategories) in thousand roubles and in amount of goods (in corresponding units of measure) for six CMEA countries “Commodity Codes” – a list of nine over-arching official commodity nomenclature goods categories. The database uses the same coding numbers as was used by official commodity nomenclature. In the database, however, only the first digit of the code was included “Commodity” – a list of translations and units of quantities of the commodity nomenclature There are also two queries in the database that present aggregated foreign trade information by code. The database is in LibreOffice-Database format (odb). Due to long-term accessibility, the tables are also provided as SQL-Scripts. The data was collected by Erik Radisch for non-commercial purposes. It is free for everyone to use. Therefore, please adhere to the same standards of citation that apply to other products of research like books and articles and refer to the source of your data as proposed by Zenodo.