How large is the global footwear trade?

World footwear trade under HS heading 64 totaled $162 billion in 2024, spread across 25 HS6 product lines, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity (OEC) - Footwear HS Profile. The figure is not an OEC original: it aggregates CEPII BACI bilateral records reported by approximately 226 economies, each mirrored export-and-import so flows can be checked against partners.

The OEC - Footwear HS Profile is the natural anchor because it is the only free source covering both sides of every bilateral flow at world scope. Its cubes are organized by HS revision: HS92 runs 1995–2024, HS17 covers 2018–2024, and HS22 covers 2022–2024, so a three-decade trend requires stitching revisions while recent years can be pulled straight from the newest cube.

USA Trade Online (US Census Bureau) complements it with a different cut: monthly merchandise imports and exports queryable by HS commodity code, country, customs district, state and port back to January 2002, exported as JSON, CSV or XLSX with no registration required. Where DataWeb answers what was bought from a given partner at the 10-digit line, USA Trade Online answers which port cleared it.

Both are public-domain US Government work. DataWeb registration through Login.gov is needed for saved queries and the REST API, whose keys expire every six months; USITC asks only for its suggested citation crediting the DataWeb and Commerce Department/Census Bureau statistics.

Each profile reports production, consumption, exports and imports in pairs, USD and average unit price, with product-type splits at HS 4-digit level and historical series back to 2016 in most charts. That unit structure is exactly what reconciles the two views: a country exporting few pairs but consuming heavily shows modest trade value against large consumption figures, while a manufacturing hub shows the reverse.

A defensible exporter/importer ranking takes five steps using free sources:

If that ranking will be published rather than kept internal, remember the constraint sitting underneath step one: OEC-derived work carries an attribution expectation to OEC and CEPII BACI, and republished APICCAPS figures need written permission.

Europe is the other structural blind spot for anyone relying on US sources alone. The Eurostat Data Browser carries the highest quality score in the pooled slice — a perfect 10 — with 8,150 SDMX dataflows spanning intra/extra-EU goods trade from January 1988 and retail price series verified through June 2026. That matters here because a meaningful share of world footwear trade moves between EU members and therefore appears only in COMEXT-style records, never in any single country's import statistics.

The footwear data guide is the pillar post tying this slice together, and the footwear data hub indexes every dataset named here. For the US-specific half of the question, HTS Chapter 64 footwear imports goes line-by-line into the DataWeb workflow, and when the choice between sources gets sharp, the OEC vs USITC DataWeb comparison settles it directly. Start with the OEC - Footwear HS Profile for the world view, then layer USITC DataWeb for line-level US detail.