NSF-Kellogg Institute Database on Economic Integration Agreements
For decades, researchers have explored the economic and political effects of economic integration agreements (EIAs) on the intensity of countries’ international trade and/or political conflict. More recently, social scientists have explored economic and political determinants of EIAs between countries. EIAs take the form of one-way and two-way preferential trade agreements, free trade agreements, customs unions, common markets, and economic unions. In 2004, sponsored by a National Science Foundation grant, Kellogg Institute for International Studies Faculty Fellow and Department of Finance Professor Jeffrey H. Bergstrand (with co-investigator Professor Scott L. Baier of Clemson University) began constructing a large data base indexing the degree of economic integration between nearly every pair of countries in the world for every year. Since 2009, the Kellogg Institute has provided support through its International Scholars Program for continued construction of the data base, which currently indexes annually EIAs between every pairing of 195 countries from 1950-2017.
Besides its scope, the NSF-Kellogg Institute EIA data base has several unique features:
(1) While most other similar data bases use a binary (0-1) variable to index the absence or presence of an EIA, our data base in Excel format uses a multichotomous index (0-6), with the following interpretations (described in detail in the data base):
0 denotes no existing Economic Integration Agreement
1 denotes a One-Way Preferential Trade Agreement
2 denotes a Two-Way Preferential Trade Agreement
3 denotes a Free Trade Agreement
4 denotes a Customs Union
5 denotes a Common Market
6 denotes an Economic Union
(2) While other similar data bases assign an index value for country-pairs for each year, our data base includes PDF copies of the original treaties determining the index value for over 98 percent of the cell entries. Whenever an index becomes positive (or its positive value changes), the Excel sheet cell entry is “hyper-linked” to the PDF copy of the treaty (or, for less than 2 percent of cells, to other documentation for the EIA).
(3) The 195 countries that we follow for our data base were determined by external information about when the countries “began.” For many cells, several of the countries did not exist until after 1950 or a subsequent year. When a country comes into existence, we “hyper-link” the previous year’s country-pair cell to a PDF documenting that existence.
Links to the EIA Database
The links below will take you to the GoogleDrive page for the zip file of the EIA Database. On that page, click the Download button in the top right hand corner to download the zip file to your computer. When the download is complete, we recommend “Extracting” the files to a new folder.
Database on Economic Integration Agreements (July 2021)
Database on Economic Integration Agreements (April 2017)
Database on Economic Integration Agreements (September 2015)