The Bilateral Longitudinal Observations and Country Statistics (BLOCS) database is a validated aggregation of existing sources made available for research purposes. It consists of varying measures for bilateral trade data between 1948 and 2022 and bilateral investment data between 2001 and 2022. This data is accompanied by an extensive set of variables that consider additional economics, political, cultural, institutional and societal factors assigned to each pair of countries for every year. This codebook offers a description of BLOCS, how the data was constructed, a summary of variables and some suggestions for how to use them.
This resource is particularly valuable for researchers, policymakers, and analysts seeking to understand the drivers of international economic relationships across different contexts and time periods. BLOCS can be used to evaluate the impact of trade agreements, as well as the influence of domestic institutional characteristics on trade patterns. By standardizing country pairs and integrating high-quality data from sources like the IMF, UNCTAD, DESTA and CEPII, BLOCS offers a reliable foundation for reproducible, cross-national analyses.
We have combined several internationally recognized datasets, with different coding practices, to offer comparable measures on trade, investment and agreements between countries. Such an economy of scope permits the efficient exploration of many topics including Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). We also transformed DESTA data into a bilateral panel to explore the effects of specific trade agreement provisions. Continue Reading