Sovereign rows of the World Bank “Trade (% of GDP)” indicator. Top 30 by most recent year. Values exceeding 100% reflect re-exports and small open economies. Aggregates excluded.
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How to use this chart
Play/Pause starts and stops the year-by-year animation, the year slider jumps to any year, and the speed selector (0.5×, 1×, 2×) changes playback speed. Each year shows the top 12 entries out of the 30 held in the dataset.
About this ranking
About this metric. “Trade Share of GDP by Country (Time Series)” reformats data published by the World Bank (World Bank indicator code NE.TRD.GNFS.ZS). Values are expressed in % of GDP.
What to watch. Hong Kong at 360% of GDP is the number to sit with: entrepôt hubs re-export most of what they import, so trade dwarfs domestic output. At the other end, giants like the US and Japan stay low — big internal markets make trade a smaller slice of the pie.
Caveats. Trade share measures openness, not volume — China’s ratio is modest even as the world’s largest trader. Re-exports and transfer pricing through hub economies inflate their ratios, and a recession can raise the share simply by shrinking GDP.
Trends in the data
The lead has changed hands. Singapore stood out at 339.31% in 1960 and peaked at 437.33% in 2008, but has fallen since and sits third at 322.37% in 2024. When high-value industries such as finance and biotechnology grow, the denominator rises and the ratio falls even though trade has not shrunk. Losing first place does not necessarily mean losing status as a trading hub. In this indicator, rank changes driven by the denominator rather than the numerator are common.
Luxembourg has grown most sharply, from 160.84% in 1970 to 412.18% in 2022, and it has led the table in some years — 375.58% in 2020, ahead of Hong Kong’s 350.68%. That is the result of a country of about 600,000 people becoming a financial and logistics junction for Europe; it is second in 2024 at 351.27%. Ireland followed a similar path, more than tripling from 74.43% to 246.17% as multinationals concentrated their European operations there.
Almost every country in the table fell together between 2008 and 2009. Singapore went from 437.33% to 358.19%, Hong Kong from 376.66% to 348.40%, and Luxembourg from 292.21% to 263.53%. Trade itself contracted in the global financial crisis, and the more open the economy the deeper the fall. High openness means taking the world business cycle undiluted.
Watch the number of reporting countries as well. Values exist for 3 countries in 1960, 13 in 1980, 22 in 2000 and 28 in 2020, falling back to 24 in the latest year, 2024. With only three lines on the chart, a “rank” in the 1960s means almost nothing. The drop at the right-hand end reflects slow reporters whose figures have not arrived, not countries that stopped trading. Gaps in a line are usually an artefact of the statistics rather than a change in reality. The quickest way into this chart is to check which years break and which years change the country count first, then follow the handful of countries with continuous coverage.
Trivia quiz
What is re-exporting imported goods with little processing called?
Entrepôt (transit) trade, developed by hubs such as Hong Kong and Singapore using their location. (Source)
What is the value of exports minus imports called?
The trade balance — a surplus when positive, a deficit when negative. (Source)
Why do large economies tend to have a low trade-to-GDP ratio?
Their big domestic markets mean trade is a smaller share of total economic activity. (Source)