InequalityThe [color=#089c9 !important]World Income Inequality Database (WIID2) (~1960-2006) compiled by UNU WIDER has Gini coefficients for 167 countries, although the time-series element of the dataset varies considerably. The website states: "WIID2 consists of a checked and corrected WIID1, a new update of the Deininger & Squire database from the World Bank, new estimates from the Luxembourg Income Study and Transmonee, and other new sources as they have became available." Quintile and decile income share data is also contained in the dataset.

The other standard source for inequality data is the [color=#089c9 !important]Estimated Household Income Inequality Data Set (EHII) prepared by theUniversity of Texas Inequality Project, where you can also find other data on inequality. Particularly noteworthy here is the [color=#089c9 !important]UTIP-UNIDO dataset which calculates the industrial pay-inequality measures for 156 countries from 1963-2003. It has a total of 3,554 observations based on the UNIDO Industrial Statistics, thus representing a very large cross-section dimension and containing annual data.

The Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) is a cross-national Data Archive and a Research Institute located in Luxembourg. The[color=#089c9 !important]LIS archive contains two primary databases.  The LIS Database includes income microdata from a large number of countries at multiple points in time, starting from the early 1980s. The newer LWS Database includes wealth microdata from a smaller selection of countries. Both databases include labour market and demographic data as well.

Facundo Alvaredo, Tony Atkinson, Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez at Oxford, PSE and Berkeley have created the [color=#089c9 !important]World Top Incomes Database. "The world top incomes database aims to providing convenient on line access to all the existent series. This is an ongoing endeavour, and we will progressively update the base with new observations, as authors extend the series forwards and backwards. Despite the database's name, we will also add information on the distribution of earnings and the distribution of wealth. Around forty-five further countries are presently under study." This is very much work in progress.

A 2005 IMF [color=#089c9 !important]working paper by Garbis Iradian ([color=#089c9 !important]Deputy Director, Africa/Middle East at the Institute of International Finance, Washington) provides inequality data for 82 countries over the period 1965–2003 (the data is averaged over periods of three to seven years). The data is constructed from household surveys.

The dataset on income inequality compiled by Klaus Deininger and Lyn Squire for the World Bank is one of the most commonly used data to investigate any links between inequality and growth at the macro level. The [color=#089c9 !important]data distributes unevenly for 138 countries and over the period of 1890-1996 (but much shorter and sporadic for the vast majority of countries).  For some countries this is not merely the Gini, but also cumulative quintile shares, available for download in Excel format.

The World Bank Development Economics Department has developed the Global Income Distribution Dynamics ([color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]GIDD), the first global CGE-microsimulation model. "The GIDD takes into account the macro nature of growth and of economic policies and adds a microeconomic—that is, household and individual—dimension to it. The GIDD includes distributional data for 121 countries and covers 90 percent of the world population." The data cover the period 1992 to 2005 (survey year), although most observations are in 2000-2002 and 2005. "The GIDD database is not a mere compilation of secondary cross-country inequality indices. Instead, it is an actual presentation of a truly global income distribution based entirely on household survey data. Additionally, the GIDD global income distribution data includes information on the conditional distribution of important household income determinants like education, age, household size, among others." There is extensive documentation for the data on the website, together with a research agenda and recent work by the group. Download is in excel spreadsheet or as a Stata file [This is used in a recent [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]paper on trade in agriculture and global poverty by Bussolo, De Hoyos and Medvedev (all World Bank) in World Economy Vol.34(12), December 2011.]

The Society for the Study of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ) has [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]links to a number of datasets for the analysis of inequality. These include the Cross-National Equivalent File (CNEF) which contains equivalently defined variables for the British Household Panel Study (BHPS), the Household Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA), the Korea Labor and Income Panel Study (KLIPS) (new!), the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), the Swiss Household Panel (SHP), the Canadian Survey of Labour and Income Dynamics (SLID), and the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP).



Sectoral Data (i): AgricultureThe UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) provides [color=#089c9 !important]FAOSTAT, which is divided into ProdSTAT, TradeSTAT, ResourceSTAT, etc. This is the primary source for cross-country data on agricultural production and trade. Data usually starts in 1961, although this varies greatly by variable and dataset.

The [color=#089c9 !important]Earth Trends database at the World Resources Institute also has (among other links) the complete FAO data for agricultural production, land, inputs, etc. from 1961 onwards. UPDATE August 2012: Sadly, the WRI no longer seem to host this dataset.

[color=#089c9 !important]A Cross-Country Database for Sector Investment and Capital (1967-1992) is a unique World Bank dataset which provides investment in fixed capital stock for agriculture, as well as a capital stock variable created by the authors - Al Crego, Rita Butzer, Yair Mundlak, and Don Larson. This version provides data from 1967 to 1992 for (up to) 63 developing and developed countries. Manufacturing is also covered separately. New-ish: The World Bank team has also created an expanded version of this, which goes up to the year 2000, albeit only for 30 countries. As far as I know the latter dataset is not in the public domain, although Rita Butzer told me they are keen to get people to use it (so just email one of the aforementioned authors). A link to a STATA version of the 'old' dataset is [color=#089c9 !important]here.

The World Bank recently completed a big data compilation exercise for [color=#089c9 !important]Distortions to Agricultural Incentives, with a team of researchers headed by Kym Anderson providing various Estimates of Distortions to Agricultural Incentives (1955-2007). A core database provides data for Nominal Rates of Assistance to producers (NRAs), together with a set of Consumer Tax Equivalents (CTEs), for farm products and a set of Relative Rates of Assistance to farmers in 75 focus countries. Note that the variable 'border price' (bp) does however not represent the... how can I say this... 'border price', but a hypothetical producer price in the absence of distortions (domestic producer price divided by (1+NRA) and expressed in USD). The border price (fob) is not contained in the main datafile but can be found in the individual country spreadsheet (rows 37-39 for primary products, or 44-46 for lightly processed products). I am grateful to Kym Anderson and Ernesto Valenzuela for clarification; they also point to an [color=#089c9 !important]alternative data reporter at Adelaide University where they are both based. See also next entry.

The Global Trade Policy Analysis group at the AgEcon Department of Purdue University provides a number of datasets related to trade but also climate change and geography. "The GTAP Data Base is a [color=#089c9 !important]fully documented, publicly available global data base which contains complete bilateral trade information, transport and protection linkages among [color=#089c9 !important]113 regions for all [color=#089c9 !important]57 GTAP commodities for a single year (2004 in the case of the GTAP 7 Data Base)." Single academic user licenses for GTAP 7 are $520, but a large number of free datasets (including summaries of GTAP, Social Accounting Matrix [SAM] extraction, the Global [bilateral] FDI Dataset, [color=#089c9 !important]Project on Bilateral Labor Migration, CO2 emissions and utilities related to the Distortions of Agri Incentives project) can be found [color=#089c9 !important]here.

[color=#089c9 !important]HarvestChoice, a collaboration between IFPRI and researchers at the University of Minnesota, "generates knowledge products to help guide strategic investments to improve the well-being of poor people in sub-Saharan Africa through more productive and profitable farming." A vast number of datasets related to agricultural production, markets, demography, climate, etc. is available for download from their website. A lot of emphasis is placed on spatial?GIS data with further tools for map-making etc available on the website. There are also a wealth of publications and policy briefs on all topics related to production, R&D and innovation in agriculture (includes analysis of US data).

The OECD has a dedicated database for [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]PSE (Producer and Consumer Support Estimates) which covers OECD member states as well as a small number of Eastern European 'Emerging' Economies and the BRICS countries for 1986 to 2008. A recent[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]paper by Kym Anderson compares and contrasts the methodology applied in his own work (see previous entry) constructing measures of agricultural production and trade distortions with that of the OECD.

The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) has produced a [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Crop Atlas of the World: "The map shows derived estimates of the spatial distribution and productivity of crops for 10-km grids using a novel allocation approach involving the fusion of sub-national crop production statistics. The values in this digital [map] are the number of harvested hectares within each 10 km grid cell. This data includes area harvested in multiple season (therefore this is NOT the physical harvested area, but rather the total area harvested) [...] The sub-national crop production data comes from agricultural censuses and surveys and has scaled values, so as to obtain national production estimates that were compatible with the annual average FAO national crop statistics for 1999-2001. The prototype crop distribution database used in this study is available from the authors upon request but is currently being regenerated using newer and additional data sources (including revisions based on expert validation) and an enhanced allocation algorithm." If you have Google Earth you can look at these data maps.

The Agricultural Market Access Database ([color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]AMAD) is a collection of available public data on WTO market access in agriculture. It contains data for over 50 countries. After registration, all files can be downloaded for free (self-extracting zip files) and there is documentation on how to do this.

The UN body which covers trade and investment, UNCTAD, has created a snazzy website that combines all of its statistical databases: [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]UNCTADstat has lots of data on trade (merchandise, services), FDI flows and stocks (inward FDI from 1970!), external finance (incl. remittances), labour force/employment, global commodity price indices (from 1960!) as well as some more recent rubrics such as the creative and information economies and maritime transport (from around 2000).

A Cross-Country Database For Sectoral Employment And Productivity In Asia And Latin America (1950-2005) by Marcel P. Timmer and Gaaitzen J. de Vries at the Groningen Growth and Development Centre. This is a balanced panel with data on agriculture, mining, manufacturing, construction, public utilities, retail and wholesale trade, transport and communication, finance and business services, other market services and government services. The sample comprises 10 East Asian Countries (nope, not China) and 9 Latin American ones. Variables covered in the data set are value added, output deflators, and persons employed... but not investment (or capital stock). Now part of the socalled [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]10-sector database.

The Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI), with research centers at the Center for Agricultural and Rural Development (CARD) at Iowa State University and the Center for National Food and Agricultural Policy (CNFAP) at the University of Missouri-Columbia, provides [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]data on commodities and agricultural policy (at the product level) for a large number of developing and developed countries (time-series dimension differs widely across variables, products and countries).

The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the UN publishes [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]AquaStat which represents a "global information system on water and agriculture, developed by the Land and Water Division. The main mandate of the programme is to collect, analyze and disseminate information on water resources, water uses, and agricultural water management with an emphasis on countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean." A bit more specifically, the main Aquastat database reports 70 variables under the headings 'Land use and population', 'Climate and water resources', 'Water use (by sector and by source)', 'Irrigation and drainage development' and 'Environment and health' for 5-year intervals from 1958-1962 onwards for a large number of countries. Other databases include the excellent 'Geo-referenced database on dams' and data on 'River sediment yields'. The data can be exported in CSV format.

CIMMYT, which stands for International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (didn't you know?) have currently got three separate datasets on their [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]website. First, some statistical price series for wheat, maize, sorghum, barley, rice, oil, fertilizers, and freight rate for wheat. This is a good dataset to act as reference global market price, since there are monthly observations for e.g. CIF Rotterdam price, but coverage varies a lot. Another interesting dataset is for agricultural production in Mexico: Agricultural information (1980-2008) related to planted area, harvested area, production, and production value of 657 permanent and seasonal crops, per cycle and regime (entries are in Spanish, but it's not too difficult to guess what 'valor ($)' means... Finally, they report the FAO data but you can pick alternative regional aggregation. [Thanks to [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Doug Gollin for these links]

The Center for International Earth Science Information Network ([color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]CIESIN) at Columbia's Earth Institute provides dozens of datasets under the headlines of Agriculture, Biodiversity & Ecosystems, Climate Change, Economic Activity, Environmental Assessment & Modeling, Environmental Health, Environmental Treaties, Indicators, Land Use (LU)/ Land Cover (LC) and LU/LC Change, Natural Hazards, Population, Poverty, Remote Sensing for Human Dimensions Research. The overarching theme for all datasets is environment and climate (change). Since not all data are accessible from the website there's a separate page for[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]downloadable data.

The PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency provides the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]History Database of the Global Environment(interestingly, the acronym is HYDE). HYDE presents (gridded) time series of population and land use for the last 12,000 years ! It also presents various other indicators such as GDP, value added, livestock, agricultural areas and yields, private consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and industrial production data, but only for the last century.

[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Rural and Urban Education (i.e. rural = proxy for agricultural population) data (1960-1985) by C Peter Timmer is available in Chapter 29, 'Agriculture and economic development', of the Handbook of Agricultural Economics, Volume 2, Part 1, 2002, Pages 1487-1546. The link above is for the IDEAS RePec entry of this article: this is a copyrighted publication, but if you have access to the Handbook through your library you can easily copy the data. The coverage is exclusively for developing countries (N=65), and the data offers average years of schooling per person over the age of 25 for the rural and non-rural areas. OECD data on the same topic should allow for the inclusion of developed countries in the analysis.

[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]International Land Quality Indexes (1987) by Willis Peterson covers relative land and cropland quality for 126 countries. The data is a single cross-section. The link is for the University of Minnesota, Department of Agriculture and Applied Economics paper (Staff Paper P87-10, 1987), which can be downloaded from the excellent [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]AgEcon website at the same institution.

Still with the topic of arable land, the FAO Statistics Division also provides [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Gini data for land holdings as well as the Number and Area of Holdings by Tenure of Holdings. These data are decadal (1970/1980/1990).

The Köppen-Geiger Climate zones, documented in the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Geography Datasets by John Gallup, Andrew Mellinger, and Jeff Sachs mentioned above are obviously a good resource for investigations of global agricultural production.

IFRPI offers acess to a number of [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]geospatial datasets on agricultural production systems and agroeco-systems.

Louis Putterman at Brown University has compiled an [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Agricultural Transition Year Data Set which provides estimates for "the year when the first significant region within each of 165 present-day countries underwent a transition from reliance mainly on gathered wild and hunted food sources to reliance mainly on cultivated crops (and livestock)." This data is very much in line with the long-run growth theory work coming out of Brown.

[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]AgroMaps at the FAO also has extensive geospatial data with relevance to agriculture.

The [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Agricultural Science and Technology Indicators (ASTI) are provided by IPRI. These are agricultural R&D indicators for developing countries only, with varying time-series coverage (earliest time around 1970, most recent up to around 2002). The data is split by institutional category (Higher Education, Private, Public Sector, NFP, government agencies) and provides numbers on researchers and R&D expenditure on agriculture.

For data covering agriculture R&D in developed countries check out the Science & Technology section of the UNESCO[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]database.

Sectoral Data (ii): Manufacturing[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Trade, Production and Protection (TPT) was compiled by Alessandro Nicita and Marcelo Olarreaga at the World Bank. This provides data on 28 manufacturing sub-sectors for 1976-2004, compiled from UNIDO IndStat and COMTRADE - since neither of these two are freely available, the Nicita-Olarreaga dataset is quite a find. Although the files are quite hefty in size, the bilateral trade data should be interesting. Note also the (static) Input-Output matrices. Apart from the WB paper describing the dataset (see link on the TPT website), it helps reading [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]this paper by Tetsuo Yamada of UNIDO.

$$ The Centre D'Etudes Prospectives et D'Information Internationales (CEPII) provides [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]TradeProd, the Trade, Production and Bilateral Protection Database used in Mayer & Zingago (2005). This data is linked to the aforementioned Nicita & Olarreaga database and covers bilateral trade data for 1980-2004, manufacturing production data to 2004, and protection data to 2001.

$$ Said [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]UNIDO IndStat4 database is now available in its 2008 version, providing number of establishments, employment, wages and salaries, output, value added, gross fixed capital formation (so that capital stock can be constructed via the perpetual inventory method) and number of female employees at the 4-digit-level of ISIC (Rev. 3!). This means data from 1990 onwards for 151 manufacturing categories. There is a second dataset contained at the 4-digit-level of ISIC (Rev. 2!), which covers 81 manufacturing sectors from 1980 onwards.
The [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]UNIDO IndStat3 database from 2006 covers 29 manufacturing sectors in 181 countries from 1963-2004 at the 3-digit-level of ISIC (Rev. 2). The data covers the same variable as the previous dataset. This is the dataset of choice if you're running production functions since it has reasonable investment coverage from around 1970.
[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]UNIDO IndStat2 2009 is out for 23 subsectors across 161 countries (1963-2007). Naturally, they do not collect data for the sectoral deflator, so it is necessary to go to the UN Common Database or individual country statistic offices to collect this information.

A Cross-Country Database For Sectoral Employment And Productivity In Asia And Latin America (1950-2005) by Marcel P. Timmer and Gaaitzen J. de Vries at the Groningen Growth and Development Centre. Described in the agriculture section above. This is now part of the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]10-sector database.

The [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Rural and Urban Education data (1960-1985) by C Peter Timmer described in the agriculture section above could be applied to manufacturing as well (non-rural education to proxy for education in manufacturing).

[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Occupational Wages around the World for 161 occupations in over 150 countries from 1983 to 2003, compiled by Richard Freeman and Reemco Oostendorp. Available at the NBER website (in STATA or ASCII format).

Sectoral Data (iii): ServicesThe World Bank’s [color=#089c9 !important]Services Trade Restrictions Database provides comparable information on services trade policy measures for 103 countries, five sectors (telecommunications, finance, transportation, retail and professional services) and key modes of delivery. "Compared to the vast empirical literature on policies affecting trade in goods, the empirical analysis of services trade policy is still in its infancy. One major constraint has been inadequate data on policies affecting services trade. Our limited knowledge of the pattern of services policy contrasts with the importance of services. Today, some 80 percent of GDP in the United States and the European Union originates from services, and the proportion is well over 50 percent in most countries, industrial and developing alike."

Trade Flows, Trade Protection/Policy and Globalisation[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]The World Integrated Trade Solution (WITS) by the World Bank is not a dataset but a software which enables the use of COMTRADE, TRAINS (UNCTAD), IDB & CTS (WTO). The link is for the software - this only works if the user subscribes to the above dataset(s).

Mitch Abdon of the Stata Daily blog recently suggested a way of [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]combining the UN ComtradeTools and Stata. Comtrade is the International Merchandise Trade Statistics (IMTS) of the UN, which records item-level trade for all countries in the world and contains around 1.8 bn observations from 1962 onwards. Access to this data is free, but for technical reasons a maximum of 50,000 observations per query (even more reason to use the Stata Daily application). Having installed the[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]software which allows one to download Comtrade data (registration/subscription required for access) there are a number of simple steps to pull this data directly into Stata and save it. In fact, the entire process is run from within Stata once everything is installed. Since I had some minor trouble setting up and getting this tool to work I've written a [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]simple Stata 10 do-file with additional information.

The European Commission's eurostat [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]COMEXT database covers trade data from 1988 to 2009 (monthly or annual) for trade with the EU or its member countries. There are some restrictions on the maximum number of cells that can be downloaded, though. You may be better off going to COMTRADE and using the help by Mitch Abdon of the Stata Daily blog to [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]combine the UN ComtradeTools and Stata:having installed the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]software which allows one to download Comtrade data (registration/subscription required for access) there are a number of simple steps to pull this data directly into Stata and save it. The entire process is run from within Stata once everything is installed. Since I had some minor trouble setting up and getting this tool to work I've written a [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]simple Stata 10 do-file with additional information. [the COMEXT data is used in a recent [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]ECB paper by Gabor Pula and Daniel Santabárbara]

[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]UNCTAD Statistical Databases compiled by the UN Conference on Trade and Development cover items such as the World Investment Report (WIR) which has data on Foreign Direct Investment and Transnational Corporations. It also has Commodity Price Statistics, data on world trade in 'creative products', ICT statistics and TRAINS (mainly tariff data). Access is free as far as I know, but you need to register. It's a bit of a struggle to get through the menus, so basically look out for 'Interactive Database' on the side-menu, since this will offer access to the Beyond 20/20 database (at least in the case of FDI). The[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]UNCTAD Handbook of Statistics now has been updated as well (is this subscription-based?).

Update September 2010: UNCTAD has now created a snazzy website that combines all of its statistical databases:[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]UNCTADstat has lots of data on trade (merchandise, services), FDI flows and stocks (inward FDI from 1970!), external finance (incl. remittances), labour force/employment, global commodity price indices (from 1960!) as well as some more recent rubrics such as the creative and information economies and maritime transport (from around 2000).

The Global Trade Policy Analysis group at the AgEcon Department of Purdue University provides a number of datasets related to trade but also climate change and geography. "The GTAP Data Base is a [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]fully documented, publicly available global data base which contains complete bilateral trade information, transport and protection linkages among [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]113 regions for all [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]57 GTAP commodities for a single year (2004 in the case of the GTAP 7 Data Base)." Single academic user licenses for GTAP 7 are $520, but a large number of free datasets (including summaries of GTAP, Social Accounting Matrix [SAM] extraction, the Global [bilateral] FDI Dataset, [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Project on Bilateral Labor Migration, CO2 emissions) can be found [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]here.

The World Bank's [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Temporary Trade Barriers Database (TTBD) website hosts newly collected, freely available, and detailed data on more than thirty different national governments’ use of policies such as antidumping (AD, 1980s-2010), global safeguards (SG, 1995-2010), China-specific transitional safeguard (CSG, 2002-2010) measures, and countervailing duties (CVD, 1980s-2010). The information provided here in this detailed database will cover over 95% of the global use of these particular import-restricting trade remedy instruments. Information is provided in excel files on a country-by-country basis, given the amount of detail provided for each county. The website also features research reports and meta-information. Chad P. Bown seems to be the person in charge.

Kristian Skrede Gleditsch at Essex University provides data estimates of [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]trade flows between independent states (1948-2000) and GDP per capita of independent states (1950-2004) for around 150 countries. These data files are too large to be opened in excel, but Kristian provides some tips on how to proceed.

The World Shipping Register provides free access to their [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]World Sea Ports database. For each country its ports' longitude, latitude and time zone are provided, for some port the maximum draft is also provided. Given the geospatial information this data could be used to calculate distance to closest port.

$$ The Centre D'Etudes Prospectives et D'Information Internationales (CEPII) [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]BACI (Italian for kiss, if I'm not mistaken; wonder whether the French knew that) dataset aims to provide the most disaggregated international trade database (more than 5,000 products) for the largest number of countries (over 200) and years (from 1995 to 2005, with updates to follow). It took me a while to realise that there is a disclaimer: "Files by year of BACI data for the period 1995-2005 are available for researchers already subscribing to the United Nations COMTRADE database. Users of BACI have to testify that their organisation is fully licensed COMTRADE to download BACI." So no baci after all.

The [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]TPT database by Nicita & Olarreaga mentioned above has data on manufacturing trade, including bi-lateral trade flows (1976-2004).

The FAO provides trade data for agricultural goods in its [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]TradeSTAT database. This can also be accessed via the World Resources Institute link - both of these can be found in the Agriculture section of this webpage.

The World Bank’s [color=#089c9 !important]Services Trade Restrictions Database provides comparable information on services trade policy measures for 103 countries, five sectors (telecommunications, finance, transportation, retail and professional services) and key modes of delivery. "Compared to the vast empirical literature on policies affecting trade in goods, the empirical analysis of services trade policy is still in its infancy. One major constraint has been inadequate data on policies affecting services trade. Our limited knowledge of the pattern of services policy contrasts with the importance of services. Today, some 80 percent of GDP in the United States and the European Union originates from services, and the proportion is well over 50 percent in most countries, industrial and developing alike."

A team at the World Bank comprising Tolga Cebeci, Ana M. Fernandes, Caroline Freund, and Martha Denisse Pierola have come up with the [color=#089c9 !important]Exporter Dynamics Database. This presently covers around 45 developed and developing countries, covering mainly 2003-2009 but also the 1990s for some countries. "It allows for cross-country comparisons of exporters based on factors such as size, survival, growth, and concentration. More countries will be added as the database expands. Until now, most databases focus not on exporting firms, but on the aggregate flow of goods across borders based on countries or products." Melitz will be happy!

Matthew Ciolek at Australian National University edits the site for the [color=#089c9 !important]Old World Trade Routes (OWTRAD) Project: "This site supports online research in the field of dromography and provides a public-access electronic archive of geo/chrono-referenced data on land, river and maritime trade routes of Eurasia and Africa during the period 10,000 BCE - circa 1820 CE." The files are published in CSV, MapInfo and Google Earth (KML) formats, downloadable by region. There's also a link to the Trade Routes Resources [color=#089c9 !important]blog [via Masa Kudamatsu's [color=#089c9 !important]DevEconData blog]

The IADB website hosts the [color=#089c9 !important]data used in the work on trade intensity and business cycles by César Calderón, Alberto Chong and Ernesto Stein (2006, JIE). From the abstract: "Using annual information for 147 countries for the period 1960-99 we find that the impact of trade intensity on business cycle correlation among developing countries is positive and significant, but substantially smaller than that among industrial countries. Our findings suggest that differences in the responsiveness of cycle synchronization to trade integration between industrial and developing countries are explained by differences in the patterns of specialization and bilateral trade."  

The World Bank recently completed a big data compilation exercise for [color=#089c9 !important]Distortions to Agricultural Incentives, with a team of researchers headed by Kym Anderson providing various Estimates of Distortions to Agricultural Incentives (1955-2007). A core database provides data for Nominal Rates of Assistance to producers (NRAs), together with a set of Consumer Tax Equivalents (CTEs), for farm products and a set of Relative Rates of Assistance to farmers in 75 focus countries. Note that the variable 'border price' (bp) does however not represent the... how can I say this... 'border price', but a hypothetical producer price in the absence of distortions (domestic producer price divided by (1+NRA) and expressed in USD). The border price (fob) is not contained in the main datafile but can be found in the individual country spreadsheet (rows 37-39 for primary products, or 44-46 for lightly processed products). I am grateful to Kym Anderson and Ernesto Valenzuela for clarification; they also point to an [color=#089c9 !important]alternative data reporter at Adelaide University where they are both based.

The OECD has a dedicated database for [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]PSE (Producer and Consumer Support Estimates) which covers OECD member states as well as a small number of Eastern European 'Emerging' Economies and the BRICS countries for 1986 to 2008. A recent[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]paper by Kym Anderson compares and contrasts the methodology applied in his own work (see previous entry) constructing measures of agricultural production and trade distortions with that of the OECD.

The Agricultural Market Access Database ([color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]AMAD) is a collection of available public data on WTO market access in agriculture. It contains data for over 50 countries. After registration, all files can be downloaded for free (self-extracting zip files) and there is documentation on how to do this.

[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Proximity in Product Space and Diversification Strategies, compiled by Valentino Piana, is not a standard trade dataset but contains data emerging from research by C. A. Hidalgo, B. Klinger, A.-L. Barabasi, and R. Haussman, published in Science under the title [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]The Product Space Conditions the Development of Nations (subscription required?). The basic idea in the paper is that the product space is like a forest, and each product is a tree, with the fanciest (highest value-added) products concentrated in the centre. Countries/producers in this product space are then like monkeys that jump from tree to tree... I'd prefer if they'd taken squirrels. Using 4-digit level trade data for a large number of countries (not sure what the time-horizon is) the authors establish the probability of a country producing and exporting good x, given that it produces and exports good y. Data at the above link includes 775-by-775 matrix of revealed proximities between products among other things.

World Bank data on [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Trade and Import Barriers has been collated by Francis Ng. Most significant time-series dimension among these is for [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Trends in average applied tariff rates in developing and industrial countries, 1981-2007.

The [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]NBER-UN Trade Data (1962-2000) is available at the Center for International Data, UC Davis website. This data, constructed by the Bobs Feenstra and Lipsey with co-authors (see [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]NBER paper #11040 for details), is organised by 4-digit ITC (Rev.2). Primacy is given for the mirror data (i.e. trade flows as reported by importing country). Wide country coverage. Users must agree not to resell or distribute the data for 1984-2000.

The [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]homepage of Andrew Rose, an economist at Haas Business School, UCB, has tonnes of data on trade, including bi-lateral trade data from 1950-1999, which can be found in the file associated with the paper “Do We Really Know that the WTO increases Trade?”. This dataset also contains a small number of geographical variables and lots of information on regional trade agreements, GATT/WTO, etc. Note that the country codes are the IMF International Financial Statisticss codes, a list of which can be found [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]here.
The dataset associated with "Does the WTO Make Trade More Stable?" seems to have a slightly better coverage, but with somewhat less variables.
Various measures for 'Remoteness' of a country (linked to GDP and distance measures) are contained in the panel data link associated with the "Currency Unions and International Integration" paper - coverage is 1960-1996 for up to 210 countries. He has a more up-to-date version of the same variable to 2000 somewhere on his website but I haven't been able to find it yet.

The World Bank compiles the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]World Trade Indicators, covering 299 indicators for 210 countries from 1995 to 2007.

Axel Dreher, a professor at the University of Goettingen in Germany, has compiled an [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Index of Globalisation, providing data on the economic, social and political dimensions of globalisation for 122 countries (1970-2005). As Masa Kudamatsu points out in his blog, [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Dani Rodrik seems to like the look of this approach. This index is now the the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]KOF Index of Globalization, provided by the KOF Swiss Economic institute at the Eidgenoessische Technische Hochschule (ETH) in Zurich. It offersdata on three main dimensions of globalization (economic, social, political) in addition to variables measuring actual economic flows, economic restrictions, data on information flows, data on personal contact and data on cultural proximity. Data are available on an annual basis for 208 countries over the period 1970-2007. This index is still based on work by [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Axel Dreher(now at Heidelberg, affiliated to KOF Swiss Economic Institute at ETH) and co-authors.

$$ The IMF has the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Direction of Trade Statistics which provides total bilateral and multilateral exports and imports (from COMTRADE), aggregated at national or regional group level. The database contains over 100,000 quarterly and annual time series data for over 200 countries and territories. The period for which data are available varies from country to country, but most countries’ data extend from the 1980’s to the present. A 'historical' dataset is available for a smaller subset of countries (1948-1980). [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]ESDS covers this database and also provides additional information.

At Jon Haveland's website we can access James Rauch's [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]categorization of SITC Rev. 2 industries according to three possible types: differentiated products, reference priced, or homogeneous goods.

$$ This is a subscription-based data source, but we were recently searching for some [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]terms of trade data and found that the World Bank World Development Indicators actually go back to 1980, whereas anything from UNCTAD only goes back to the mid-1990s. Search for "Net barter terms of trade index".

Trade Unit Value indices (import, export) are provided in the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]TradePrices database by the Centre D'Etudes Prospectives et D'Information Internationales (CEPII) at the aggregate manufacturing sector level as well as 3-digit-level (ISIC).

The US Government Office of the Trade Representative [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]National Trade Estimate Report on Foreign Trade Barriers (link for 2008 report) surveys significant foreign barriers to U.S. exports. The report provides, where feasible, quantitative estimates of the impact of these foreign practices on the value of U.S. exports. These reports (compiled since the 1980s but only available online from 2001) are only published in pdf format. The data is perhaps most useful when reading up on the trade regime in individual countries.

The Center for International Business (CIB) at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth has established the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]CIB Trade Agreements Database and Archive. The database contains the text-searchable versions of all bilateral and regional free trade agreements and customs union agreements that have been notified to the WTO, and are in force, plus many that have not been notified to the WTO. The Archive contains the full texts of these agreements.

Investment Flows, including Foreign Aid and Foreign Direct Investment
With regard to macro FDI data the UNCTAD [color=#089c9 !important]World Investment Directory on-line provides a wealth of information on FDI inflows and outflows, stocks, etc. Note that you CAN download data for more than just one country by going to 'Interactive Database' (links on the left of the page), which will take you to 'FDIStat' which is of the standard 20/20 format.

Update September 2010: UNCTAD has now created a snazzy website that combines all of its statistical databases:[color=#089c9 !important]UNCTADstat has lots of data on trade (merchandise, services), FDI flows and stocks (inward FDI from 1970!), external finance (incl. remittances), labour force/employment, global commodity price indices (from 1960!) as well as some more recent rubrics such as the creative and information economies and maritime transport (from around 2000).

The Global Trade Policy Analysis group at the AgEcon Department of Purdue University provides a number of datasets related to trade and investment but also climate change and geography. "The GTAP Data Base is a [color=#089c9 !important]fully documented, publicly available global data base which contains complete bilateral trade information, transport and protection linkages among [color=#089c9 !important]113 regions for all [color=#089c9 !important]57 GTAP commodities for a single year (2004 in the case of the GTAP 7 Data Base)." Single academic user licenses for GTAP 7 are $520, but a large number of free datasets (including summaries of GTAP, Social Accounting Matrix [SAM] extraction, the Global [bilateral] FDI Dataset, [color=#089c9 !important]Project on Bilateral Labor Migration, CO2 emissions) can be found [color=#089c9 !important]here.

A fantastic resource for aid empiric fans is provided by AidData (see separate entry below): [color=#089c9 !important]replication data for a vast number of empirical papers related to aid and development (all those Tarp et al, Rajan and Subramanian, Burnside and Dollar, Roodman papers) are linked or provided for download. [Thanks to [color=#089c9 !important]Paddy Carter at Bristol for the link]

A new database for all metrics related to foreign aid has been launched with a conference in Oxford in March 2010: [color=#089c9 !important]AidDatahas compiled figures "from a range of official sources, including the OECD Creditor Reporting System (CRS) database, donor annual reports, project documents from both bilateral and multilateral aid agencies, and data gathered directly from donor agencies". Crucially, the database covers both commitments and disbursements (which like in the FDI case deviate considerably) and refers to grants, mixed loans and grants, loans at discretionary rates from multilateral agencies, loans/loan guarantees at market rates, lechnical assistance, and sector program aid transfers in cash or in kind. There's a [color=#089c9 !important]blog and lots of dedicated tools and information about aid data. All of this is the follow-up to the PLAID Project (a partnership of theCollege of William and Mary and Brigham Young University) which has now merged with Development Gateway's Accessible Information on Development Activities (AiDA) [thanks to [color=#089c9 !important]Nic van de Sijpe for the pointer].

The Kiel Institute for the World Economy provides very detailed [color=#089c9 !important]foreign-investment data for three OECD economies, namely Germany, Japan and the United States. The data are annual for 1980 to 2010 and give you the share of each of these three countries' sectoral investment in geographic regions (and a small groups of named countries within each region outside the OECD) as a percentage of total sectoral FDI.

The World Bank has recently published its annual World Development Report, which this year focuses on [color=#089c9 !important]Conflict, Security and Development. A dedicated [color=#089c9 !important]website makes the data underlying the analysis in the report easily accessible. The excel spreadsheet covers a total of 211 countries, with maximum coverage over the years 1960-2009. The data is not limited to conflict and political economy issues but also covers geography, colonial history and foreign aid among other topics. All of the data is publicly available (and many datasets are featured here on MEDevEcon), but the unique advantage here is bringing a vast number of conflict-related data from dozens of sources (PRIO, UNHCR, Polity IV, etc.) together in a single spreadsheet (and doing a great job documenting the data and sources.

$$ The IMF recently started the [color=#089c9 !important]Coordinated Direct Investment Survey (CSID), which will provide a measure of the stock of FDI by source country. 130 receiving or investing economies have signed up for this project, which will provide the first data in around mid-2010. Unfortunately, they will only publish the stock data, not the flows on which these are based.

The OECD has detailed data on aid flows and ODA, as well as international direct investment, contained in its brilliant new[color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]OECD iLibrary. Data coverage varies, e.g. for FDI flows by industry we have data for 1980-2007, whereas for ODA by recipient country the data is for 1960-2007. The OECD also maintains the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]QWIDS Query Wizard for International Development Statistics, which helps when you are selecting and downloading aid-related statistics.

The World Bank and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) "have partnered to make global data on aid funding more easily accessible. [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Aidflows offers new transparency about the flow of development funds from countries providing aid resources (donors) to countries receiving these funds (beneficiaries).  This initiative is part of ongoing efforts to enhance the open access to data and information on development aid." For the moment it seems (conditional on my not being too inept to find the option) that display of data is limited to the last decade - it might be useful to change this given that lots more data is available. There are a lot of graphs and tables, bringing together WB and OECD indicators/data - a useful feature is the link to the WB and OECD data sources, i.e. you get taken to OECD DAC dataset if you want more details on ODA. [This was mentioned in a blog entry by [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Neil Fathom of the World Bank]

The UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) maintains the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Financial Tracking Service (FTS). "FTS is a global, real-time database which records all reported international humanitarian aid (including that for NGOs and the Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement, bilateral aid, in-kind aid, and private donations). FTS features a special focus on consolidated and flash appeals, because they cover the major humanitarian crises and because their funding requirements are well defined - which allows FTS to indicate to what extent populations in crisis receive humanitarian aid in proportion to needs... All FTS data are provided by donors or recipient organisations." [this data was featured on the UK [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Guardian newspaper's [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Global Development Data website]

The Washington-based Center for Global Development (Roodman, Radelet, Subramanian, Birdsall, Clemens and many others) have a [color=#089c9 !important]link to datasets on their publications website. Highlights include data on net-aid transfers (1960-2007):see the next two entries.

From the same source is David Roodman's [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Commitment to Development Index (CDI), which "rates 22 rich countries on how much they help poor countries build prosperity, good government, and security. Each rich country gets scores in seven policy areas, which are averaged for an overall score." The CDI was first compiled in 2003.

CGD's [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]David Roodman has updated his [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Net Aid Transfer database at the beginning of this year. "NAT is built from the same underlying DAC data as ODA. The NAT data set includes totals by donor (for 1960–2009), by recipient (1965–2009), and by donor and recipient (1965–2009), all in current and constant dollars. Figures by donor are also available in national currencies. The data tables by donor and recipient are too large to fit in a Microsoft Excel 2003 file, and so are provided as comma-delimited text files in a zip archive." This [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]paper Roodman has written in 2005 is also relevant.

The World Bank publishes the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]Migration and Remittances Factbook (2011) as part of the OpenData initiative. This covers inflows and outflows of remittances from 1970 to 2009 (+2010 estimated) for basically all countries in the world (naturally: lots of missing observations, but from the mid-1970s onwards the data coverage is pretty impressive).

Chris Adam at Oxford University provides the [color=rgb(0, 137, 201) !important]files for the social accounting matrix and GAMS/Matlab program code for his work on aid in African economies for use in CGE and DSGE modelling.

Historical Data (pre-1900)
Please note that the data below may also contain micro-datasets - I felt it more advantageous to bring all the historical datasets together in one spot, rather than divide them between macro and micro.

Diego Comin and Bart Hobijn constructed the [color=#089c9 !important]Historical Cross-Country Technology Adoption (HCCTA) dataset, available at NBER. This data allows for the analysis of the adoption patterns of some of the major technologies introduced in the past 250 years across the World's leading industrialized economies. This comes as an excel file with macros included, but if you prefer to play around with full data you can download the ASCII version.

The Economic History Association has links to a number of [color=#089c9 !important]databases for economic historians. In order to use these you just need to register with EH (free). Just looking at the data titles, this is a great resource: Italy - Florentine Domains and the City of Verona: 1427, French Slave and Long Distance Trading Profits During the 18th Century, Ottoman Economic/Social History: 1600-1900, to name just a few. Naturally, these data are primarily for (now) developed economies, but there are some links to colonial data, e.g. Developing Country Export Statistics: 1840, 1860, 1880 and 1900.

The [color=#089c9 !important]European State Finance Database is an open repository for economic historians co-managed by Dr D’Maris Coffman (Centre for Financial History, Newnham College, University of Cambridge) and Dr Anne Murphy (University of Hertfordshire). It "represents the outcome of an international collaborative research project for the collection, archiving and dissemination of data on European fiscal history across the medieval, early modern and modern periods." At the moment there are links to around 60 datasets, covering Spanish crown finance, Restoration Excise Receipts (1660-1708) and many other interesting-sounding datasets. Definitely a treasure trove for empirically-minded economic historians. [Thanks to my buddy [color=#089c9 !important]Mark Koyama for pointing out this database]

Another astonishing resource for historical data is provided by the [color=#089c9 !important]Global Price and Income Group at UC Davis. Looking at their datamap, SSA is blank, but there are quite a few sources for Latin America, South Asia and East Asia.

Louis Putterman at Brown University has compiled an [color=#089c9 !important]Agricultural Transition Year Data Set which provides estimates for "the year when the first significant region within each of 165 present-day countries underwent a transition from reliance mainly on gathered wild and hunted food sources to reliance mainly on cultivated crops (and livestock)." This data is very much in line with the long-run growth theory work coming out of Brown.

Data on [color=#089c9 !important]Anglo-African Trade (1699-1808), originally compiled by Marion Johnson, is available on the Dutch Data Archiving and Networked Services webpages, crediting J. Th. Lindblad at Leiden. "This dataset contains figures on the trade between England and Africa during the period 1699-1808: imports, exports, re-exports and indirect imports. A distinction is made between different trade flows (Londen, outports, re-exports in time and out of time, etc.). Quantities and values are given for 1100 different commodities in the eighteenth century, units (also decimalized) and pounds. Aggregates are given for each year and for each type of trade. The dataset also includes the total trade figures for England between 1700 until 1800. The dataset has been created for research purposes, in order to analyse the trade between England and Africa in the eighteenth century." Documentation is limited and you have to register and log in to get access to these data (in txt format).

A team of researchers headed by David Eltis and Martin Halbert (both at Emory University in Atlanta) provide a fantastic resource for the empirical analysis of the slave trade: [color=#089c9 !important]The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database "comprises nearly 35,000 individual slaving expeditions between 1514 and 1866. Records of the voyages have been found in archives and libraries throughout the Atlantic world. They provide information about vessels, enslaved peoples, slave traders and owners, and trading routes. [...] The website provides full interactive capability to analyze the data and report results in the form of statistical tables, graphs, maps, or on a timeline." The dataset contains the 99 variables and is made available in three formats: SPSS (.sav), comma delimited (.csv), and dBase (.dbf).  [Thanks to [color=#089c9 !important]James Fenske at Oxford for pointing out this database]

Bob Allen's website at Nuffiled has links to [color=#089c9 !important]historical wage and price data for a number of countries, cities and occupations respectively.

David Ormrod, James M. Gibson and Owen Lyne (University of Kent) provide decadal time series [color=#089c9 !important]data on rent movements in London and the South-East of England for 1580-1914. Their paper lends support to the notion that ‘the city drove the countryside, not the reverse’ in terms of development, which is (said to be) expressed in research by [color=#089c9 !important]Bob Allen amongst others. The debate seems relevant to development economics today where some people talk about anti-agriculture bias and suggest that because the largest share of the work force is engaged in agriculture this sector must be the focus on development/policy efforts.

Patrick Manning at the World History Center, University of Pittsburgh, is governor to the [color=#089c9 !important]World-Historical Dataverse Project, which is "intended to the contribute to creation of a comprehensive set of data on social-scientific, health, and environmental data for the world as a whole and for its constituent regions and localities, for the past four or five centuries." At present a total of nineteen datasets are linked but I imagine this is going to increase soon. [Also check out Manning's article in the Journal of Comparative Economics [color=#089c9 !important]"Historical datasets on Africa and the African Atlantic" (subscription required) from which the previous entry on Anglo-African trade was taken]

Joerg Baten, a professor for economic history at Tuebingen (or as we folk from nearby Metzingen would say: Gogenhausen) University provides a [color=#089c9 !important]wealth of historical data on the website for his chair. One data hub provides height measures ("Data on heights and the biological standard of living are among the most important sources of information in social- and economic-historical research, especially for the pre-statistical period") for Germany, the US, Austria, and a number of other countries. The second data hub is entitled 'Firms and Capital Markets' and offers stock exchange data data from Germany, Russia, the US, England and China starting from the early 19th century. Users need to register to access the data and are also encouraged to deposit their own historical datasets (not all data posted is from Professor Baten).

Louis Putterman at Brown University provides another historical dataset, the [color=#089c9 !important]World Migration Matrix (1950-2000), detailing for each of 165 countries "the proportion of the ancestors in 1500 of that country's population today that were living within what are now the borders of that and each of the other countries." There's a lot of documentation provided to reference all these estimates.

The PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency provides the [color=#089c9 !important]History Database of the Global Environment(interestingly, the acronym is HYDE). HYDE presents (gridded) time series of population and land use for the last 12,000 years ! It also presents various other indicators such as GDP, value added, livestock, agricultural areas and yields, private consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and industrial production data, but only for the last century.

The Yale School of Management has a dedicated website for [color=#089c9 !important]Historical Financial Research Data which includes the Shanghai Stock Exchange project (during the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries) and data for the famous South Sea Bubble: "The South Seas Bubble 1720 Project is a collection of stock prices for  a large number of the traded companies in 1720. These include Dutch firms quoted in markets in the Netherlands, British firms quoted in the Netherlands,  and some previously unstudied  British firms quoted in London."

The Center for Financial Stability (CFS) hosts the [color=#089c9 !important]Historical Financial Statistics, which aims "to be a source of comprehensive, authoritative, easy-to-use macroeconomic data stretching back several centuries. Our target range of coverage is from 1492 to the present, with special emphasis on the years before 1950, which few databases cover in detail." (hm, why start with 1492 if most data are for other countries than North American ones?). The archive, edited by Kurt Schuler, was only started in late 2010, so there are for now a lot of empty spreadsheets in the 'Country' section of the website (which splits statistics into 'Country tables' and 'International tables'). [I found a link to HFS on GMU's [color=#089c9 !important]David Youngberg's website]

Nathan Nunn at Harvard University provides the data for his papers on his [color=#089c9 !important]personal website, which includes (among others) US state-level data on slavery (1790-1860) and slavery data for The Americas in 1750. The data is in Stata format.

Matthew Ciolek at Australian National University edits the site for the [color=#089c9 !important]Old World Trade Routes (OWTRAD) Project: "This site supports online research in the field of dromography and provides a public-access electronic archive of geo/chrono-referenced data on land, river and maritime trade routes of Eurasia and Africa during the period 10,000 BCE - circa 1820 CE." The files are published in CSV, MapInfo and Google Earth (KML) formats, downloadable by region. There's also a link to the Trade Routes Resources [color=#089c9 !important]blog [via Masa Kudamatsu's [color=#089c9 !important]DevEconData blog]

[color=#089c9 !important]Historic Commodity Price data (1835-1950) for 35 countries, which includes some developing and colonialised countries such as China, Cuba, Ceylon, among others. The data is provided by Chris Blattman and the link gives a number of papers and references with detailed information on the data. [I got this link off Masa Kudamatsu's blog.]

The Center for Geographic Analysis at Harvard University in collaboration with Shanghai's Fudan University provides a large number of [color=#089c9 !important]historical GIS 'maps' for China: once mastered (no simple task) this type of Geographical Information Systems (GIS) data allows for spatial analysis of Chinese development. You need to register but access is free, data is in shapefiles or xls or Access (depending on the dataset). There are a large number of datasets from the days of the Legalists and Qin Shihuang (221 BC) to the 1990s (AD).

Michael E. Mann, Raymond S. Bradley, and Malcolm K. Hughes provide the [color=#089c9 !important]data to go with their 1998 Nature article entitled 'Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing over the past Six Centuries'. There are annual grid-ed temperature data for 1730-1980 and even longer time series going back to the 1400s. [Thanks to [color=#089c9 !important]James Fenske at Oxford for pointing out this database]

The Data & Information Services Center (DISC) Archive at University of Wisconsin-Madison provides access to the raw data and documentation which contains information on the following [color=#089c9 !important]slave trade topics from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: records of slave ship movement between Africa and the Americas, slave ships of eighteenth century France, slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, Virginia slave trade in the eighteenth century, English slave trade (House of Lords Survey), Angola slave trade in the eighteenth century, internal slave trade to Rio de Janeiro, slave trade to Havana, Cuba, Nantes slave trade in the eighteenth century, and slave trade to Jamaica. This aside DISC hosts a number of datasets with relevance for economic historians [Thanks to Gunilla Petterson, who featured the DISC site on [color=#089c9 !important]developmentdata.org]

Funded by the IADB, the Oxford Latin American Economic History Database ([color=#089c9 !important]OxLAD) contains statistical series for a wide range of economic and social indicators covering twenty countries in the region for the period 1900-2000. Its purpose is to provide economic and social historians worldwide with a systematic recompilation of available statistical information in a single on-line source. The website also provides other resources including a long list of references, many of them in Spanish, and detailed discussion of the methodology of data construction. Downloads are in csv format.

马克

顶一下，确实不错~

好东东，谢谢。

不错，知识的力量是无穷的。

楼主牛了

哦卖糕的，都是英文，谢谢啦

顶楼主，wind什么的

8错8错

太好了 谢谢！

上次是微观的数据，这次是宏观的 楼主给力

i可以给个文件，这样更好啊，谢谢啊

收藏。

感谢之余，不禁感叹信息量之大。楼主能否推荐几个免费的宏观数据库，俺主要是研究农业经济的。

mark