CEPII makes available a "square" gravity dataset for all world pairs of countries, for the period 1948 to 2006. This dataset was generated by Keith Head, Thierry Mayer and John Ries to be used in the following paper:
HEAD, K., T. MAYER AND J. RIES, 2010, “The erosion of colonial trade linkages after independence” Journal of International Economics, 81(1):1-14. (formerly CEPII discussion paper # 2008-27)
All variables are described in the data appendix of the paper which you should turn to for details and reference when using this data. The main variables relating to trade costs come from the CEPII distance datasets to which we added new covariates, and that we arranged in a way such that it can be easily merged with any matrix of bilateral flow (usually trade, but many gravity applications use FDI, migrations, or other types of bilateral flows) using standard ISO codes for countries and for any year between 1948 and 2006. Below we reproduce this appendix, describing the data:
GDPs and populations come from the World Bank's World Development Indicators (WDI). Note that in accordance to trade flows, GDPs are not deflated. Since the WDI excludes Taiwan, we use national data sources. WDI also starts in 1960 and sometimes does not keep track of countries that ceased to exit, or changed definitions. Typically, WDI has Russian GDP starting in 1989. In order to correct both problems, we complement WDI with population estimates provided by Angus Maddison (http://www.ggdc.net/maddison/Historical_Statistics/horizontal-file_10-2006.xls). Furthermore, we also use the 1948--1992 GDP estimates collected by Katherine Barbieri and made available by the Correlates of War project (http://www.correlatesofwar.org/).
RTAs are mainly constructed from three main sources: Table 3 of Baier and Bergstrand (2007) supplemented with the WTO web site (http://www.wto.org/english/tratop_e/region_e/summary_e.xls) and qualitative information contained in Frankel (1997). GATT/WTO membership of different countries over time comes from the WTO web site. The data on currency unions are an updated and extended version of the list provided by Glick and Rose (2002). Data on common legal origins of the two countries are available from Andrei Shleifer at http://post.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/shleifer/Data/qgov_web.xls.
Bilateral distances and common (official) language come from the CEPII distance database (http://www.cepii.fr/anglaisgraph/bdd/distances.htm).
The ACP variable refers to a sequence of agreements conferring preferential treatment of imports from former colonies and some other developing countries (e.g. Liberia). Our ACP dummy is coded as one when an ACP country is included in the agreement and it exports to a member of the EC/EU.
We also provide for replication purposes of Head et al. (2010) quoted above a lighter dataset, including trade flows (cleaned and treated as described in the data appendix) but restricted to observations where those trade flows are non-missing.
Both datasets are available in Stata10 format. Questions should be sent to thierry.mayer@cepii.fr
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