Introducing RED – The Relational Export Dataset

Abstract

This technical paper gives an overview of our new data set on trade data (RED). It provides comparable dyadic trade data between nation-states for the period 1870 to 2018. To do this, it follows an interdependence-centred approach to explain the diffusion of governmental social policies. We deliver temporally consistent data on interstate linkages for the largest possible sample of countries by combining trade data from UN Comtrade (Comtrade, 2022), UNCTAD (UNCTAD, 2021), and the Correlates of War (COW) Project. In contrast to other data sets, the RED does not represent absolute monetary trade volumes in a given currency. Rather it depicts the ratio of trade flows between two countries and the total exports of the specific exporting country. So far there has been no data set that meets these requirements. As we show during this paper, the use of RED helps finding more detailed results.