Trade Flow Market Analysis: Exploring Nigeria’s Cocoa Trade

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. What I learned

3. What I Analyzed

4. Key insights from the analysis.

5. Conclusion

Introduction

This week I worked on an in-depth analysis of Nigeria’s cocoa and its preparation trade data in 2013 using the data gotten from UN Comtrade database. The aim was to demonstrate how data is being cleaned, transformed, grouped, and aggregated while using the split-combine-apply approach. Tools like charts or pivot tables are included for further clarification to achieve actionable and powerful insights which uncovers patterns in trade relationship and key trade partners.

What I learned

• Key concepts: Transforming data, Aggregation operations: Split-apply-combine approach, Data grouping, Charts generation and Pivot table.

• Frameworks: Pandas, Matplotlib, Pivot Table

What I Analyzed

2013 Nigeria’s Cocoa and its preparations trade flow data.

• Technical Discussion:

1. Data Source: Data was sourced from the United Nations Comtrade Database, which holds all trade statistics in the globe. I focused on analyzing and examining trade activities in Nigeria’s Cocoa and Cocoa preparations Trade (2013) with commodity code 18. Each dataset was downloaded as a CSV file and loaded into a pandas dataframe.

   

2. Understanding the dataset: The dataset contained several column headings like ‘cmdCode’, ‘partnerIso’, ‘cifValue’, ‘refYear’, ‘cmdDesc’ etc which I was tasked with identifying key columns and ignoring the unrelevant fields.

   

3. Data Cleaning: Key columns were identified and subsetted then renamed for clarity. Fields with the partner “World” were excluded which maintained the focus on country-to-country trade relationship.

   

Key insights from the analysis

1. Nigeria had a trade surplus of over 500 million naira which shows that it is a net exporter of cocoa products.

2. Ghana is Nigeria’s main partner but analysis shows that Nigeria exported back three times that same year though the value is not as much.

3. Nigeria imported Cocoa from 34 countries and exported to 35 countries in the year 2013.

4. Netherlands seconded by Malaysia by trade value was identified as the main importers of Cocoa in 2013.

5. Netherlands was also identified as part of the top 5 exporters but its export value is not close to 1/3 of import value (estimately 285 million naira).

6. Nigeria is not dependent on its regular customers as they are no records of countries that buy from Nigeria every month hence they did not contribute to the total export value in 2013.

Conclusion

With these visualizations, it gives valuable insights into the Nigeria’s Cocoa data trade activities in 2013. These experience has strengthened my ability to interpret economic datasets on various sectors which would help point out clear seasonal patterns within these markets.