Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act data

Data

Joanne Gowa and I collected commodity-level import data for the United States for the years between 1934 and 1946. Our main source of data is Foreign Commerce and Navigation of the United States. An annual publication, it lists U.S. exports and imports for all commodities by country. The publication also includes data on the quantity trade, when appropriate, the tariff rate, and whether the commodity received an RTAA rate. We collected data for the years 1934 to 1946. In the 1933 publication, the number of commodity lines was much smaller than in subsequent years making comparisons difficult. No publication was released at the 6 digit commodity level for 1947. The data were collected and entered by hand, with column and row totals created to check the data as they were entered.

For each of the years, we entered the data at the commodity line given in the publication. From 1934 to 1942, commodities were listed using 5 digits with some exceptions at the 6 or 7 digit level. Starting in 1943, commodities were listed using 7 digits but in the vast majority of cases the last two digits were 0. To make the data before and after 1943 comparable, we added two zeros to the pre-1943 commodities. We also entered the commodity line description for each commodity to ensure that the lines are comparable.

Directory structure

raw contains the data as it was hand-entered. The Excel file usrtaa_M.xlsx has the import data by commodity, country, and year. Each sheet is a separate year. Country names are in the columns and the commodity number is in the rows. Additionally, column B has an indicator if the line is under an agreement rate ("A") or is duty-free ("F"). Column C is the commodity total as given in the publication while Column E is the sum of the country entries. Column D is the difference between columns C and E. It should be zero for all entries.

The file rtaa_tar.xlsx has the tariff rate for each commodity by year. As with usrtaa_M.xlsx, each worksheet is a separate year. Column A has the commodity code and column B the tariff rate for the year.

rtaa_cty.xlsx lists the commodity line covered by each of the RTAAs.

rtaa_wd.xlsx also has separate spreadsheet for each year. This file has information on the total imports by commodity for each year, the tariff rate for the year, and the quantity of goods imported. As suggested by the file's name, each sheet has the overall total by commodity.

scripts has Stata scripts to combine the individual trade and XR files as well as to aggregate them into single files.

• yearly_reshape.do will take the worksheets from usrtaa_M.xlsx and reshape them so that rows are identified by country and commodity. The file will merge in the tariff rate for the year and a standardized country label and Correlates of War country code. The file uses - ccode.ado a Stata command that I wrote long ago to convert between the main country classification schemes used in IR research. The command will convert between COW, IMF, World Bank, Banks, and country names. There is a help file with more detail on using the command.

• panel_format_setup.do aggregates the yearly Stata import files into a single panel data file. It incorporates two further scripts in this subfolder: tariff_recode.do and multilines.do. Commodity line numbers changed over time so tariff_recode.do recodes older lines into newer commodity lines when they shared the same description. multilines.do changes commodity line numbers when a commodity line has multiple tariffs. There are also two data files used in this do file: wdrtaa.dta and rtaa_cty.xlsx. The latter file (rtaa_cty.xlsx) has data on commodity lines covered by RTAAs along with the country that negotiated the rate and whether the rate is bound or free. The former file has total trade fore ach commodity in each year as well as the tariff rate, the quantity of the import, and the unit the quantity is measured in. The final output from this do file--a Stata file--is saved in the data subfolder.

stata has US commodity level imports for each year and for each trading partner in a separate Stata file. csv also has US commodity level imports from each year and for each trading partner, but in csv format.

We use the Correlates of War country code as our standardized code for countries and territories. Not all the trade entities are in the COW country codes so we additionally created our own codes for countries or territories without a COW code. The utility ado command ccode is available on GitHub.