Differences in trade turnover indicators between countries have methodological and technical reasons, Armstat clarifies

During the CIS summit in Tajikistan, a discussion took place between Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan and Russian President Vladimir Putin regarding the volume of foreign trade turnover between Armenia and Russia. However, the leaders' observations on the figures did not coincide.

To clarify the statistical data, Armenpress turned to Lilit Petrosyan, a member of the State Statistics Council of the Republic of Armenia, who noted that the latest summarized and published data for this year cover the period of January to August.

 “According to the latest summary of information received from the State Revenue Committee on September 16, 2025, the volume of Armenia’s foreign trade turnover with the Russian Federation in January-August 2025 amounted to 4.5 billion USD, compared to 9.2 billion USD in the same period last year.'' (https://armstat.am/file/article/sv_08_25a_411.pdf).

When asked whether it is possible for two partner countries to record different foreign trade figures for the same period, Petrosyan explained: “Of course, such differences have methodological, technical and other reasons, which Armstat has repeatedly published in specialized statistical reports on foreign trade under the title "Reasons for the Differences in Indicators of Partner Countries in the Field of Foreign Trade Statistics" ( https://armstat.am/file/article/ft_2_nish_2018_21.pdf)

The international experience shows that the differences are happening in the partner countries’ exports and imports value and volume indices in the field of foreign trade statistics. The results of the maintaining of mirror statistics show that although all countries use the UN offered common methodology of the maintaining of foreign trade statistics ("International Merchandise Trade Statistics: Concepts and Definitions 2010" ) however, there are certain differences in the indices of the partner countries that are stipulated by some objective and subjective factors. In the foreign trade statistics maintaining practice the deviations in statistical data by the nature of origin are divided into 3 main groups:

Methodological

•according to the international standards, the partner countries define the statistical value of imported goods at CIF prices, for exported goods at FOB prices. In difference with FOB price the CIF price also includes the transportation costs and insurance charges for given goods and stipulated by this, in case of observation of the value volumes of export and import of the same goods for two comparable countries, they may not fully correspond to each other and have the same size. 

•general and special features used in the field of foreign trade by partner countries, according to which, in case of common system the custom territory of the country corresponds to the economic area in special case, it doesn’t (according to the UN proposed methodology the both are applicable),

 • possible deviations related to the formulation of foreign trade operations, due to the wrong registration of goods origin / destination country, 

•conditioned with the peculiarities of some goods (precious stones and metals, electricity, bunker fuel, caught fish from the open sea and transported goods for repair purposes) the difficulties arise when using the customs formalities’ unified approaches of different countries customs authorities, 

•some differences are possible in the customs formalities’ approaches for goods subject to custom control transported by the natural persons, 

•differences of the methods of determining the customs value of goods (transaction price, market price and so on).

b)Technical 

• the time difference occurs between the origin country’s goods export delivery registration date and the host country's registration date that in the international trade , in average takes 3-4 weeks and varies depending on the geographic location, the type of transportation, the nature of the transported goods,

•difference of peculiarity’s definition of partner-country (trading country, contracting country, goods origin country) . For example in the case of “contracting country", it is possible that the given goods of this country may be delivered to another country, and so they can be registered by the delivering (exporting ) country as “export” and may not be registered by the other contracting party. Or, for example, the exporting country is enable to change the final destination country formulated in advance and export to another third country related to the transportation (delivery) (according to the UN proposed methodology the tree options are applicable), 

•in some cases, the goods delivered by the exporting country don’t reach the country of destination because of being damaged or being reformulated in a transit country, 

• in many countries there are restrictions on the disclosure of information related to the certain goods, for example, when crossing the national borders the partner country may intentionally not register the exported or imported goods, while the other partner-country is registering this product.

C)Intentionally distortion of statistical data: 

• importers can declare goods with false product code, as well as they can intentionally reduce the cost of imported goods to minimize the customs duties. Exporters can intentionally overestimate the quantity and cost of exported goods with the purpose to increase the returnable VAT,

 •  the parties in trade relations may intentionally indicate incorrect the partner country.