About
Every four years, nations compete to become world champions on the football pitch. But every day, nations compete in another global arena: trade.
The products countries make, export, and import shape jobs, incomes, innovation, and economic prosperity. Understanding how countries trade helps us understand how the world works.
Welcome to the OEC World Trade Cup, where trade data meets competition. Explore how nations compete in global markets, test your knowledge, and earn points for your national team.
How to play
Pick a match
Pick a match from any of the eligible matchups.
Answer 5 questions about bilateral trade
You will see a product during each round and will need to select the country that exports more of the product to the other. Get it right and you score a goal. Get it wrong and the opponent scores.
Bonus round
Select the country with a net trade with the other.
Scoring
At the end of the game you get 3 points for a win, 1 point for a tie, and 0 points for a loss.
Leaderboard
The leaderboard shows your performance based on the total number of points, goals for, against, and time (since play time is used as a tiebreaker on the leaderboard). Shorter times are better.
Data
All trade figures come from the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC), using the BACI bilateral trade dataset. Products are classified at the HS4 level (4-digit Harmonized System codes), covering thousands of distinct goods from Cars to Soybeans to Integrated Circuits.
For each match, the game fetches the most recent year of data available in OEC for that specific country pair.
Built by
OEC — Observatory of Economic Complexity
The OEC is the world's leading visualization engine for international trade data. It tracks bilateral trade flows between 250+ countries across thousands of products, making complex economic data accessible to researchers, policymakers, and the public.
In collaboration with
CCL — Center for Collective Learning
The Center for Collective Learning studies how knowledge moves, grows, and decays — from teams to nations, and from the past to the future. CCL is a multidisciplinary research team based at the Toulouse School of Economics' Institute for Advanced Study and at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Corvinus University of Budapest. CCL explores the principles governing the growth, diffusion, and value of knowledge, from the formation of ideas to collective decision-making.
Oxford TIDE — Technology and Industrialisation for Development Centre
Oxford TIDE explores the complex relationships between trade, investment, technology, industrialisation, and innovation in the context of development. Based at the University of Oxford, it operates as a multidisciplinary research hub that champions advancing knowledge on innovation and industrial policy to address widening technological disparities and support equitable prosperity globally. The centre partners with international organizations including UNDP, the World Bank, and the IDB on development initiatives spanning biodiversity, industrial policy, and technology innovation.
Privacy
By playing the World Trade Cup, you agree that your use of the game is governed by the OEC Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy.
The OEC may collect gameplay and usage data, such as game progress, answers, scores, timing, session information, device/browser information, and interaction patterns. We use this information to operate and improve the game, understand how users interact with trade data, prevent abuse, and produce aggregate analyses, including public blog posts or reports. Public analyses will use aggregated or anonymized data and will not intentionally identify individual players.
The World Trade Cup includes a public leaderboard. When you participate, the display name you enter, together with your score, rank, and related gameplay statistics, may be shown publicly as part of the competition.
Display names are provided by players and are not authenticated by the OEC. Players should not use their real name or include personal information in their display name unless they are comfortable with that information being publicly visible.
The OEC may also use leaderboard and gameplay data to analyze participation, understand user behavior, improve the game, and publish aggregate analyses, blog posts, or reports about the competition. Public analyses will generally use aggregated or anonymized data. If individual leaderboard entries are discussed, they will be limited to the display name and public competition information shown on the leaderboard.