Replication Package for "Digital Readiness, Investment and ICT Export Competitiveness in BRICS and Peer Economies: A Comparative Panel Analysis"

This replication package supports the article “Digital Readiness, Investment and ICT Export Competitiveness in BRICS and Peer Economies: A Comparative Panel Analysis”. The package contains a harmonised comparative country-year panel, variable documentation, official-source lineage, a bounded R&D interpolation log, source-to-panel construction code, econometric analysis code, analytical outputs, verification reports, environment requirements, manifests and SHA-256 checksums. The analytical universe comprises 45 economies observed over 2010–2023: the eleven current BRICS economies and 34 peer economies selected using a pre-specified income-and-population rule. The study distinguishes ICT goods exports from ICT service exports and estimates country- and year-fixed-effects models with lagged R&D, FDI and digital-readiness covariates. The dataset was compiled and harmonised from official public data sources. No synthetic country-year observations were created. The primary analysis uses observed-only data. Forty-four bounded internal R&D interpolations are explicitly documented and are used only in sensitivity analyses. The package reproduces the workflow from documented official sources to the harmonised 630-row panel and from the analytical panel to the reported substantive results.