A study of the distribution of the value of traded goods under the Harmonized System
is presented. The ramifications of this classification system are found to exhibit
an approximate power law decay, indicating complexity and self-organization in the
nomenclature of traded merchandises. For almost all countries with available data,
log-values of annually imported and exported goods are well described by three-parameter
Weibull distributions. This distribution commonly appears in particles size distributions,
suggesting a connection between random fragmentation processes and the mechanisms
behind the international trade of merchandises. Analysis of the resulting values for
the fitting parameters from 1995 to 2018 shows a nearly constant linear relationship
between the parameters of the Weibull distributions, so that, for each country, the
distribution of log-values can be approximately characterized by a single shape parameter
beta. The empirical findings of this paper suggest that specialization on trading
a constant set of goods prevents the values of all traded merchandises from growing/decreasing
simultaneously.
