GTI OPEN RESEARCH NETWORK
Motivation
Commodity-level analysis—particularly at the HS chapter, heading, and subheading levels—has long been underrepresented in the international trade literature. While substantial progress has been made using aggregate and firm-level data, high-resolution product-level analysis remains relatively limited, largely due to data fragmentation, classification complexity, and the analytical burden associated with working at scale.
As a result, critical dimensions of trade performance—such as export diversification, structural transformation, market concentration, competitiveness, and resilience to external shocks—are often examined without sufficient product-level granularity. This limitation is especially binding for developing and low-income economies, where commodity composition plays a central role in shaping growth prospects, external vulnerability, and policy effectiveness.
GTI was established to help address this gap.
Through the development of more than 7,000 HS-based analytical dashboards, GTI provides a comprehensive infrastructure for systematically examining global trade patterns across products, countries, regions, and time. This infrastructure directly supports GTI’s work in providing analytical and advisory support to governments—particularly low-income and least-developed countries—where services are offered free of charge and focus on improving trade performance, strengthening institutional capacity, and supporting effective integration into global markets.
The GTI Open Research Network builds on this foundation by expanding the analytical interpretation of this evidence through independent research.
What the Open Research Network is
The GTI Open Research Network is a collaborative research framework that affiliates GTI with researchers, universities, and policy institutions engaged in international trade and development research.
The Network enables researchers to independently explore GTI’s HS-level analytical infrastructure and contribute research outputs that deepen understanding of commodity-level trade dynamics. These outputs complement GTI’s support to governments by strengthening the empirical basis for commodity-level diagnostics, analytical reporting, and policy-relevant insights used in advisory work.
Research conducted within the Network is disseminated openly on the GTI website with full authorship recognition. The collaboration is scholarly in nature, centered on knowledge creation and public dissemination, while preserving full academic independence.
Affilation and Research Standard
Affiliation with the GTI Open Research Network is intended for researchers with an established engagement in international trade or closely related fields.
Researchers, universities, and policy institutions interested in affiliating with the Network are invited to contact our research team at research@gticonnect.org to inquire about affiliation requirements and the collaboration process. Requirements are communicated directly and assessed in light of research background, relevance to commodity-level trade analysis, and alignment with the Network’s research focus.
Role of Affilated Researcher
Affiliated researchers engage with GTI’s HS-level dashboards to:
- Identify structural, emerging, and persistent trade patterns at the commodity level
- Produce analytical outputs such as research notes, reports, and policy briefs
- Contribute to improving empirical understanding of product-specific trade dynamics
- Generate evidence that supports policy dialogue related to trade performance, diversification, and resilience
Research produced through the Network strengthens the analytical foundation underlying GTI’s free support to governments, without creating service obligations or contractual relationships. GTI does not direct research agendas, impose timelines, or restrict scholarly interpretation. All outputs are published openly with attribution.
Shared Objective
The GTI Open Research Network exists to advance commodity-level trade research as a public good and to reinforce the evidence base supporting GTI’s assistance to governments in developing and low-income countries. By combining large-scale analytical infrastructure with independent scholarly expertise, the Network helps close persistent data and analysis gaps while contributing to more informed, evidence-based trade policy discussions.
This is a collaboration among peers, grounded in research quality, openness, and public dissemination.