When two countries trade with each other and neither is the United States, whose currency is the price in?
Dominant Currency Paradigm
Gita Gopinath et al. (2020) · American Economic Review 110(3)
Article ↗ · Replication data ↗ (openICPSR)
The archive requires an account we do not hold, so the files were not opened. What follows rests on the published abstract and on this platform's own observations.
What the authors found
Gopinath and co-authors propose a dominant currency paradigm: most trade is invoiced in dollars regardless of who is buying and selling, prices are sticky in that currency, and imported inputs matter for production. Testing it on bilateral price and volume indices covering 91 per cent of world trade, plus firm-level Colombian customs data, they find exchange rate pass-through and trade elasticities depend on the dollar rather than on the currencies of the two countries actually trading.
What our data adds
The asymmetry the paper rests on is visible in this database from the trade side alone. In 2025 the United States imported 3.5 trillion dollars of goods against a world total of 25.7 trillion — 13.7 per cent. The dollar's share of trade invoicing is several times that. Put plainly: roughly seven of every eight dollars of world goods imports are bought by somebody who is not American, and a large share of those purchases is still priced in dollars. That gap between America's weight as a buyer and the dollar's weight as a unit of account is the whole subject of the paper.
| Figure | Value | Indicator |
|---|---|---|
| World goods imports, 2025 | 25.7tn USD | IMTS.MG_CIF_USD.A |
| US goods imports, 2025 | 3.5tn USD | IMTS.MG_CIF_USD.A |
| US share of world goods imports | 13.7% | IMTS.MG_CIF_USD.A |
Every figure here is computed from observations in this database and can be charted, downloaded or queried.
What this cannot show
This database has no invoicing-currency data at all, so it cannot measure the dollar share it is talking about — that figure comes from the paper and from central bank surveys, not from here. What our data provides is the denominator that makes the asymmetry legible. The IMF bilateral series also begins in 2010, so nothing here speaks to how this arrangement arose.