The Observatory of Economic Complexity describes itself as a tool that allows users to quickly compose a visual narrative about countries and the products they exchange. Their superb interactive visualization below shows the makeup of Ireland’s 2010 exports.

For the full story of how the country’s exports have changed since 1962 (from 23% live cattle to current 2.1%) , check out the full interactive at The Observatory of Economic Complexity.

It provides:

The observatory provides access to bilateral trade data for roughly 200 countries, 50 years and 1000 different products of the SITC4 revision 2 classification.

The source for the data

1962 – 2000: The Center for International Data from Robert Feenstra

2001 – 2009: UN COMTRADE

The source code for the visualizations is available on github and you can access the data via an API.

(h/t Worldbank)