Tax Lab · International & cross-border tax
East Africa Trade Risk Observatory
Live mirror-trade gaps between Uganda and its trading partners -- Uganda's own declared export figures against each partner's own declared import figures -- fetched from UN Comtrade and refreshed every six hours, not a bundled snapshot.
Every number on this page comes from a live API call, not a stored file. Fetched 2026-11-07 04:26 UTC; refreshed at most every six hours.
What changed here
The Tax Lab catalogue describes this prototype's own data as "not independently verified for this catalogue entry; treat jurisdiction-level figures as illustrative pending a direct data audit." That caveat applied to a bundled sample file. This page doesn't ship one: it calls UN Comtrade, WITS and UNCTADstat directly, server-side, each time it's requested. The mirror-trade method the catalogue describes -- comparing a country's declared trade values against its partner's own mirror statistics -- is implemented literally below: Uganda's declared export value to each partner and that partner's own declared import value from Uganda are two separate, independent API calls, and the gap between them is real, not simulated.
The live data
Live, UN Comtrade
Mirror-trade gap by partner
Hover a bar. Gap = (partner's declared imports from Uganda − Uganda's own declared exports) ÷ partner's declared imports, both sides real UN Comtrade figures for the most recent year bothreporters had filed (never two different years paired together).
Live, WITS
Uganda's applied tariff rate, by year
Hover a point. Uganda's most-favoured-nation applied tariff rate, simple average across all traded product lines, by year. Source: WITS (World Bank/UNCTAD/WTO).
Live, UNCTADstat
Uganda's inward FDI flow, by year
Hover a point. Foreign direct investment flowing into Uganda that year (not the cumulative stock). Source: UNCTADstat.
Reading the mirror-trade gap
In principle, Uganda's declared exports to a partner should roughly equal that partner's declared imports from Uganda, adjusted for freight and insurance (exports are typically valued FOB, imports CIF, which alone explains a small positive gap). A gap much larger than that difference can mean under-invoicing, mis-classification, transit/re-export effects, or simply that one side hasn't filed complete data for the year yet -- it is a signal to look closer, not evidence of mispricing on its own.
Limitations
- Covers total merchandise trade (cmdCode TOTAL), not product-level detail; a real audit would need HS-code-level gaps to find specific mispriced flows.
- Comtrade reporters file at different speeds; a partner is only shown once both sides have filed the same year, so a partner can be missing from the chart (or compared on an older year than Uganda's own latest) if its statistics office is behind.
- Partner coverage here is a small, curated set (Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, DR Congo, China) kept short because UN Comtrade rate-limits bursts of requests on the free tier.
- This replaces the catalogue entry's own investment-flow and CbCR-based profit-shifting estimate with what's actually verifiable live: trade value gaps, tariffs and FDI flows. It does not estimate a tax-revenue-at-risk figure, since that would need the firm-level CbCR data the catalogue entry itself flags as unverified.
Sources, called live: UN Comtrade International Trade Statistics Database; WITS (World Integrated Trade Solution, World Bank/UNCTAD/WTO); UNCTADstat. Client: lib/tradeApis.ts, adapted from the AfCFTA Terminal project's own api kit.