RED – The Relational Export Dataset

The Relational Export Dataset “RED” provides comparable dyadic trade data between nation-states for the period 1870 - present. This dataset is built in accordance with the analytical focus of the DFG-funded "Collaborative Research Centre 1342 - Global Dynamics of Social Policy" (CRC 1342). In principle, this large-scale project follows an interdependence-centered approach to explain the diffusion of governmental social policies from 1880 to the present. Trade linkages are an explanatory variable in this respect (Windzio et al., 2022). This requires temporally consistent data on interstate linkages for the largest possible sample of countries. So far, there has been no data set that meets these requirements. We, therefore, introduce a dataset which combines trade data from UN Comtrade (Comtrade, 2022), UNCTAD (UNCTAD, 2021), and the Correlates of War (COW) Project (Barbieri and Keshk, 2016). Unlike most databases, the data here does not represent absolute monetary trade volumes in a given currency. Rather, the data depicts the ratio of trade flows between two countries and the total exports of the specific exporting country. Hence, we measure trade in relational terms weighted by the respective importance of trading partners for one another. These relations are estimated from both an export and an import-oriented point of view; in this technical description, however, we focus on the ratios estimated solely with export values.

关系出口数据集（Relational Export Dataset, RED）涵盖1870年至今的主权国家间可比双边贸易数据。本数据集依托德国研究基金会（Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG）资助的"合作研究中心1342——社会政策全球动态"（Collaborative Research Centre 1342 - Global Dynamics of Social Policy, CRC 1342）的分析导向搭建而成。该大型项目本质上以相互依存为核心研究路径，旨在阐释1880年至今各国政府社会政策的扩散历程。就此而言，贸易联系是该研究的核心解释变量（Windzio等，2022）。这要求获取覆盖尽可能多国家、时序一致的国家间联系数据。截至目前，尚无符合上述要求的数据集面世。为此，我们整合了联合国商品贸易统计数据库（UN Comtrade, 2022）、联合国贸易和发展会议（UNCTAD, 2021）以及战争相关因素项目（Correlates of War Project, COW, Barbieri和Keshk, 2016）的贸易数据，构建了本数据集。与多数数据库不同，本数据集未采用特定货币计价的绝对贸易额作为统计指标，而是以两国贸易流量与出口国总出口额的比值作为统计依据。因此，本研究以双边贸易伙伴间的相互重要性为权重，以关系性维度衡量贸易联系。上述贸易联系可从出口和进口两个维度进行测算；但在本技术说明中，我们仅聚焦于基于出口额测算的比值数据。