About
The HS Tracker is a toolset that has been developed by the Secretariat of the World Trade Organization (WTO), with the support of the World Customs Organization (WCO), to allow different stakeholders (e.g. customs and trade officials, statisticians, lawyers, researchers, etc.) to track the changes of particular headings or subheadings across different versions of Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (HS).
The HS is a multipurpose international product nomenclature developed and maintained by the World Customs Organization (WCO). It is periodically updated to secure uniform interpretation or to reflect changes in trade patterns, changes in manufacturing processes or technological advancement; it also addresses environmental and social concerns (e.g. FAO, CITES, Montreal protocol, etc.).
The World Customs Organization aims at enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of Customs administration through the uniformization and harmonization of customs legislations. To assist the Members, the WCO has developed rules, standards and international norms such as the HS nomenclature over the past 60 years. To this day, the WCO continuously provides documentation such as the Correlation Tables that are key elements to the smooth understanding and interpretation of the different Harmonized System editions (1992, 1996, 2002, 2007 etc.).
The Subheading visualizer function displays graphically the manner in which a specific HS code has changed across different versions of the Harmonized System (e.g. mergers, splits and complex cases), including the explanation by the WCO on why the changes were undertaken in the context of a particular amendment. The English and French versions of these explanations, as well as the correlation tables, have been sourced directly from the WCO webpage. However, the information in Spanish is an unofficial translation by the WTO Secretariat.
The HS at a glance function provides a broad overview of the HS amendments by consolidating the different versions of the HS in one combined structure that was developed by the WTO Secretariat based on the information by the WCO and adjusted according to the different transposition exercises of the WTO Schedules of concessions. The filters and search functions make it possible to browse multiple HS nomenclatures simultaneously for a particular set of codes, and determine whether they were affected by a particular amendment to the HS.
Disclaimer: The information provided by the Correlation tables and its related tools such as the HS Tracker have no legal status and are provided to facilitate the implementation of HS amendments. Users are invited to consult the HS nomenclature and official documents before classifying goods.
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Data sources
The data used in the HSTracker mainly originates from the Harmonized Commodity Description and Coding System (HS) which is developed and maintained by the World Customs Organization (WCO). It was complemented by the EU Combined Nomenclature sourced from Eurostat's Reference And Management of Nomenclatures (RAMON), Convenio Multilateral sobre Cooperación y Asistencia Mutua de Aduanas de América Latina, España y Portugal (COMALEP) and documents from the World Trade Organization.
| Information | Source | |
|---|---|---|
| HS codes | World Customs Organization (WCO) | |
| WCO Trade Tools | https://www.wcotradetools.org/ | |
| Standard Product description | English | World Customs Organization (WCO) |
| French | World Customs Organization (WCO) | |
| Spanish | Convenio Multilateral de Aduanas de América Latina, España y Portugal (COMALEP) | |
| Self-contained description | English | European Commission, Eurostat, RAMON |
| French | European Commission, Eurostat, RAMON | |
| Spanish | European Commission, Eurostat, RAMON | |
| Correlation | World Customs Organization (WCO) | |
| Remarks for correlation | English | World Customs Organization (WCO) |
| French | World Customs Organization (WCO) | |
| Spanish | World Trade Organization (WTO) |