Research in international trade has moved to phenomena on the sector, product, firm or even plant level. We need high quality historical micro data to explore these things. That makes the harmonized identification and classification of commodities crucial. Without a classification consensus, it is impossible to answer questions on topics such as vertical quality specialization, diversification, trade in value-added, revealed comparative advantage, the gains from trade or intra-industry trade.

We want to achieve a minimum consensus among all the historical research teams on how to build a sound, question-compatible classification of products and sectors. This would ensure the construction of historical and long-term trade datasets at the product level, comparable across and countries. The suggested two 90-minute sessions would be a major step into that direction.