9320817 Feenstra The rapid rise in global trade during the past decades has fueled world growth, and led to a transformation of developing and developed economies alike. Understanding the sources of international trade, and the impact of policy on trade, continues to be an important topic of academic and government inquiry. Essential to this study are large data sets on trade flows and other aspects of trade that span countries, industries and time, and not only span them but are comparable across countries, industries, and time. Unfortunately, data of this type are not readily available to researchers. Each country collects trade figures for its own purposes, particularly tariff collection and the administration of other trade regulations. Each country's system is different, and has changed over time. Even the collection of many countries' data by the UN according to successive versions of the Standard International trade Classification (SITC) does not produce data that are consistent over time or that fit the industry classifications of the United States or the United Nations. The result is that each trade study involves heavy expenses, and investments of time and effort to manipulate these extremely large data sets and ;put them in analytically useful forms. These expenditures of time and effort are overlapping and duplicative, but despite the expenses involved for researchers and agencies that finance research, there is little carryover or sharing of information, and much effort is wasted. The purpose of this project is to construct, assemble and concord a number of large data sets on international trade and on country commodity and industry characteristics that determine trade flows, and make them widely available. The project will provide well-annotated and convenient trade sets in machine readable form on U.S. imports and exports, world trade, world prices, country resource supplies, and industry inputs. The data on country resource supplies is especially exciting. It could be come a key data source for the study of international trade patterns and global environmental change. These data have also been used to study the determinants of growth in capitalist versus socialist economies. The existing data set contains data on trade flows and such resource characteristics as land differentiated both by use (arable, pasture) and by climatic area for 34 countries in three year intervals from 1958 to 1975. The data exist in published form to permit the number of countries int his database to be expanded from 34 to over 90 with annual coverage to the present.
