WITS - World Integrated Trade Solution - January 21 and 23, 2006

Introductory Course - Trade and Protection Data Queries, January 21, 2006

• Azita Amjadi, Information Officer, DECDG
• Phillip Schuler, Senior Economist, PRMTR
  

Advanced Course - Tools for Market Access Analysis, January 23, 2006

• Marcelo Olarreaga, Senior Economist, DECRG
• Olivier Jammes, WITS Coordinator, DECDG

Participants of this course should have attended the WITS Introductory Course or a previous WITS training.

Course Description: World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS) is a software developed by the World Bank, in close collaboration with the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). WITS allows users to retrieve trade and tariffs information from four major databases, analyze the data and perform tariff cut simulations:

• the UNSD COMTRADE database, which contains bilateral, HS 6-digit level data for over 270 countries and geographic entities, some of which have been reporting since 1962
• UNCTAD’s TRAINS database which contains national tariff line level information on imports, tariffs, para-tariffs and non-tariff measures for 169 countries
• the (WTO) IDB database that contains imports by commodity and partner countries as well as MFN applied tariffs for over 120 countries at the most detailed commodity level of the national tariffs
• the WTO CTS database, the official source for bound tariffs, which are concessions made by WTO countries.

The Objective of the training is to introduce the participants to WITS, and to teach them how to:

• check data availability by country, year and product classification for each database
• view these data by product classifications, reporting countries, direction of trade flows, or years
• create and save queries for multiple countries, products, years and flows
• create user-defined country and product groups; calculate simple averages or weighted tariff rates
• simulate the effects on tariff structures of tariff reduction proposals submitted to the WTO’s Negotiating Group on Market Access, as part of the Doha round of negotiations
• simulate the partial equilibrium effects of user-defined tariff change scenarios on trade flows, tariff revenue and welfare for a single import market at a time
• save and export extracted or computed data (e.g., to MS Excel) for further computation

Non Bank staff RSVP by sending an e-mail to emugo@worldbank.org  with name, title and organizational affiliation.

Contact Elizabeth Mugo at emugo@worldbank.org  with any questions.