Two Centuries of Bilateral Trade and Gravity Data: 1827-2014

This document provides a detailed description of the Historical Bilateral Trade and Gravity Data set (TRADHIST) that was put together for Fouquin and Hugot (2016) and designed for historical investigations of international trade. The data set is available on the website of CEPII. Specifically, the data set has been built to explore the two modern waves of globalization: the First Globalization of the nineteenth century and the post-World War II Second Globalization. The data set gathers five types of variables: i) bilateral nominal trade flows, ii) country-level aggregate nominal exports and imports, iii) nominal GDPs, iv) exchange rates, and v) bilateral factors that are known to favor or hamper trade, including geographical distance, common borders, colonial and linguistic links, as well as bilateral tariffs. This data is unique both in terms of temporal and geographical coverage. Overall, we gather more than 1.9 million bilateral trade observations for the 188 years from 1827 to 2014. We also provide about 42,000 observations on aggregate trade, and about 14,000 observations on GDPs and exchange rates respectively.