Gaps between what countries report as the value of their trade with one another have widened sharply over the past decade, according to a new report from Global Financial Integrity (GFI). Global Patterns in Trade-Related Value Gaps (2013–2022) puts the annual gap between developing nations and all of their global trading partners at more than $3.2 trillion in 2022, up over 80 percent from $1.76 trillion in 2013.
Built on a decade of bilateral trade records from the UN Comtrade database, the report uses these “value gaps”, the difference between what an exporting country reports selling and what its partner reports buying, as an indicator of potential trade misinvoicing, one of the largest and hardest to trace channels through which illicit money moves across borders.
China posted the largest gap of any country by a wide margin, averaging $695.7 billion a year, with Turkey ($151.9 billion), Poland ($132.7 billion), Mexico ($127.3 billion) and Thailand ($117.6 billion) rounding out the top five. Measured against the size of each country’s trade, though, the picture changes: The Gambia (44 percent), Gabon (29 percent), Tanzania (28 percent) and Ghana (28 percent) show the deepest relative exposure, pointing to real strain on customs revenue and oversight in smaller, commodity-reliant economies.
A narrower look at trade between developing countries and 36 advanced economies tells a similar story at a smaller scale: gaps rose from $1.01 trillion in 2013 to $1.73 trillion in 2022, with China, Poland, Turkey and Mexico again topping the dollar rankings, and The Gambia and Sierra Leone showing the widest gaps as a share of trade.
“These are not one-off anomalies,” the report notes, but a recurring feature of the trading system, driven by inconsistent reporting standards, uneven enforcement across customs authorities, and financial incentives that reward mispriced trade. GFI notes that a value gap signals risk, not proof: mirror-trade analysis cannot show which side of a transaction — or whether either side at all — is responsible for a given discrepancy.
Key recommendations:
- Strengthen customs risk management and data analytics so authorities can flag high-risk transactions, sectors and trade corridors without slowing down legitimate trade.
- Expand access to partner-country trade data through stronger data-sharing arrangements and cooperation with international organizations.
- Improve the consistency of trade reporting by aligning CIF/FOB valuation practices and commodity classification standards, and investing in customs capacity in developing countries.
- Increase transparency in high-risk sectors such as high-value commodities, complex supply chains, re-export hubs and free trade zones.
- Deepen international cooperation on enforcement so information moves as quickly across borders as the trade it’s meant to monitor.