Visualizing the United Kingdom’s Trade Flows
After the announcement of the Brexit, I wondered how it would effect the international community. I turned to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) to take a look at the United Kingdom and its global trade partners.
Taking import and export data from the OEC’s API, I did some preprocessing in pandas, and then simply plugged the data into a D3plus Sankey visualization. It was interesting to see what countries are linked to the UK, and at what scale:
Alex Simoes also suggested looking at the data by continent, breaking Europe into EU member and non-member states. The flow below shows the macro trade flows in and out of the UK:
Looking at the country data, one surprise for me was the relative scale of trade between the UK and the Netherlands. At the continental level it was interesting to see that there was relatively little trade between the UK and South America (in green above).
Have a look for yourself and and explore the interactive version here. See what interesting patterns you discover.
