Building BLOCS

The  Bilateral  Longitudinal  Observations  and  Country  Statistics  (BLOCS)  database  is  an  open source,  validated  aggregation  of  internationally  recognized  data  made  available  for  research purposes.  It  consists  of  varying  measures  for  bilateral  trade  data  from  1948  to  2023  and bilateral  investment  data  between  2001  and  2023.  These  data  are  accompanied  by  an extensive set of variables that consider additional economic, political, cultural, institutional and societal  factors  assigned  to  each  pair  of  countries  for  every  year. 

BLOCS began as “As a Database for Investigating Foreign Direct Investment” in 2016 (Wu J.P. et al, 2017). We have developed this project for our own research and wish to share it with the research community to reduce the resources required to explore bilateral country pair observations, with varying coding practices, across time. We offer varying measures of the same, or similar, attributes and phenomena by transforming time series and other data formats into comparable bilateral panel data. We hope you can use it for your research and welcome any merges you would like to share with our lab.

Please find the complete dataset and documentation:

This release: 31-August 2026.
Next available release scheduled for: 31-July 2027.

This data can be cited using the following reference: 

Wu. J.P., Banach, C., Delgadillo Canqui A., Duspara A., Silva Neira I., Valenzuela,. F. (2026). BLOCS Codebook: Bilateral Longitudinal Observations and Country Statistics (Version 4.0). Aletheia White Paper Series 04/26

Please use the following references for version 3.2: 

Wu. J.P., Silva Neira I., Banach, C., Goulas, S. (2026). Building BLOCS and Stepping Stones: Combined Data for International Economic and Policy Analysis, International Interactions, 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050629.2026.2715480

Wu. J.P., Banach, C., Duspara A., Silva Neira I., Valenzuela,. F. (2025). BLOCS Codebook: Bilateral Longitudinal Observations and Country Statistics (Version 3.2). Aletheia White Paper Series 03/25

Wu. J.P., Banach, C., Goulas, S., Silva Neira I. (2024). Building BLOCS and Stepping Stones: Combined Data for International Economic and Policy Analysis v3.2. IPE Berlin Working Paper, No 239/2024

Additional information about BLOCS v4.0 

BLOCS 4.0 introduces several substantive and structural improvements to prior releases. Bilateral trade and trade-agreement coverage has been updated through 2023, UN country codes have been updated to the 2026 standards and continental and regional classifications have been added. The database now incorporates technological-intensity classifications for product-level trade using the SITC–Lall Concordance. It also adds the World Bank’s Deep Trade Agreements data.

The BLOCS Lab is dedicated to constant process improvement and the advancement of our collective understanding of relationships that exist between economies. We hope our project can be useful for early stage researchers as well as researchers in need of a robust multi-measure database for complex analysis of country pairs. By integrating a broad range of data and validating observations, BLOCS provides a unique platform for uncovering new insights into the dynamics of global trade and investment. Future expansions and updates are planned to reflect changing economic trends and institutional changes. We are hopeful that BLOCS can be a relevant and valuable resource for exploring dynamic economic relationships between countries that include institutional, historical and cultural variables. Please contact us if you have any suggestions for improvement or would like to contribute to the work we do at our lab.

We are in the process of developing a query that will allow users to select years and variables for export. Until then the entire file and the process by which it was developed can be found by clicking the link below. Please send us an email if you find bugs, or can offer any suggestions for upcoming releases.