Notice of RetractionStatistical methods of international agricultural trade

Notice of Retraction

After careful and considered review of the content of this paper by a duly constituted expert committee, this paper has been found to be in violation of IEEE´s Publication Principles.

We hereby retract the content of this paper. Reasonable effort should be made to remove all past references to this paper.

The presenting author of this paper has the option to appeal this decision by contacting TPII@ieee.org.

Statistics plays significant role in agricultural trade. Two statistical systems are widely used in international agricultural trade. One is United Nations Standard International Trade Classification (SITC), the other is Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (HS). Different categorization of agricultural products by the two systems gives rise to the range of product specification. On comparing and analyzing product ranges and features of six statistical methods, this paper discusses their advantages and disadvantages, and matches statistical ranges under HS and SITC. The paper argues that each statistical method has its application also with inconsistent range definition. A complete, exact and comparable definition of agricultural product range could provide resolution to the above issues. By matching the codes of the same product under HS and SITC to get counterpart relationship, the paper harmonizes trade data under different categorizing systems and provides basis for establishing standard statistics system and basic data platform.