Data - ROBERT C. FEENSTRA

Center for International Data

Robert C. Feenstra is the Director of the Center for International Data (CID), an organization within the Department of Economics at UC Davis that collects, enhances, creates, and disseminates international economic data. Click on the link below to navigate to the CID website. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please send an email to [email protected].

http://cid.econ.ucdavis.edu

The CID webpage includes U.S. tariff data (1972-2001), U.S. import/export data (1972-2006), and United Nations COMTRADE import/export data up to the year 2000, re-organized into what is called the World Trade Flows (WTF) database.

World Trade Flows (WTF) Bilateral Data:

A small part of the WTF database are files that give total bilateral trade between country pairs. While the WTF files report trade disaggregated by SITC (Standard International Trade Classification, version 2), the WTF bilateral files add up across all these manufacturing, mining (including oil) and agricultural goods. Values of bilateral trade in these files are in US $1,000 (nominal, not adjusted for inflation). The WTF bilateral files (up to the year 2016) are available here.

Creation of WTF and Quality-adjusted Trade Prices:

We next provide programs that can be used to convert COMTRADE trade data to the WTF database for years beyond 2000. This is part of a larger project of creating quality-adjusted trade prices, as done by Robert Feenstra and John Romalis,“International Prices and Endogenous Quality” , The Quarterly Journal of Economics, May 1, 2014, vol.129 (No.2) pp. 477-527 (stored under “Papers” on this website).

The Stata main program for that larger Feenstra-Romalis project consists of three steps:

Step 1 is responsible for the creation of the dot, wtf and wtf_bilateralfiles directly from the trade files downloaded from the UN Comtrade web site.
These are the “Read Me First” instructions for an easy local computer installation of the downloadable_zip_file which contains the simplified directory structure, the Stata do files and also some useful end user documentation for this step.
Step 2 is responsible for the estimation of most of the model’s parameters used during Step 3.
These are the “Read Me First” instructions for an easy local computer installation of the downloadable_zip_file which contains all the Stata do files responsible for all parameters’ estimation together with all input files used and the output Stata dta files generated. It comes with some useful Step 2’s end user documentation.
Step 3 is responsible for the creation of the quality adjusted price indexes and of the quality indexes by using all the files created in Step 1 and also all model’s parameters estimated during Step 2.
Note: Step 3 is cumulative in a sense that it already includes Step 1.
These are the “Read Me First” instructions for an easy local computer installation of the downloadable_zip_file which contains the program’s entire directory structure, the Stata do files and also some useful end user documentation for this step. You may also find some of the data required for replication here.