The ongoing international movement to phase out mercury,
mainly
led by the Minamata Convention on Mercury, raises concerns about illegal
intercountry trade, including smuggling. This study aims to detect
the existence of illegal intercountry mercury trade under the social
mercury phase-out movement, focusing on discrepancies in each country’s
trade statistics. To analyze the trends by year and country for discrepancies
in intercountry mercury trade, an intraclass correlation coefficient
(ICC) was applied to the mirrored exports and imports from trade statistics
of each country provided by the UN Comtrade. The year-based ICC analysis
identified a tendency to reduce the detection of discrepancies in
the reported mirrored exports and imports for mercury at the intercountry
level under the recent mercury phase-out movement. Through an ICC
analysis focusing on exporting and importing countries, the validity
of the ICC analysis was verified as a way to detect illegal intercountry
trade of mercury. Our analyses detecting the illegal trade of related
countries contribute to the effectiveness evaluation and custom capacity
building required in the Minamata Convention by offering a data-driven
method to enable the effective detection of illegal mercury trade.
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