Estimating Undocumented Transactions of Exports and Imports of Goods in Indonesia

Exports and imports have strong relationship with Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) inclusive economic growth (goal 8) and consecutively affect other SDGs. 2008 SNA and BPM6 manuals recommend that the compilation of exports and imports in national accounts should cover illegal transactions. In Indonesia case, we use undocumented transaction terminology to align with the coverage of production. Estimating undocumented transactions of exports and imports, particularly in goods, is very important and challenging, as the transactions are very potential to take place in Indonesia economy, regarding that the country has very large territory with thousands islands and shares borders with 10 countries. In this study, we applied some procedures to estimate the undocumented transactions, i.e. use of news from online newspapers, use of corporate financial statements to estimate imports of satellite trade, use of administrative data to estimate fuel trade, and use of processed mirror data from UNCOMTRADE to adjust administrative data from Indonesian Customs. Furthermore, those estimation results will be confronted with other data in the supply and use table framework to make it more consistent and coherent. In order to improve the estimation result continuously, the study should be followed up with other research in related topic particularly in estimating insurance and freight ratios by country and commodity