RCA
Description
The new RCA database contains revealed comparative advantage measures (RCA) obtained by using the methodology suggested by Costinot et al. (2012) - adjusted for a proper worldwide comparison of indexes.
The index is provided for 20 countries over the period 1995-2010 at two different product disaggregation levels (HS-2 and HS-4). Each database contains 5 variables:
- country is the country of interest (i.e. the exporter country);
- isocode is the ISO 3166-1 numeric code of the country;
- year is the year dimension;
- hs2 or hs4 indicates the sector of interest (respectively HS-2 and HS-4);
- RCA is the index of revealed comparative advantage.
Reference document to cite: Leromain, E. and G. Orefice (2014) "New Revealed Comparative Advantage Index: dataset and empirical distribution", International Economics, 2014, vol 139(3), pp. 48-70.
Person in charge & contact: Gianluca Orefice, rca
cepii.fr
Licence: Etalab 2.0
Methodology
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The RCA index is based on econometric technique discussed in Leromain and Orefice (2014). All in all, it is a three steps procedure:
- First, we estimate country pair-product specific export flows using exporter-product and importer-product fixed effects.
- Second, we use the coefficients associated with the exporter-product fixed effects to recover a productivity parameter (which is then country-product specific)
- Third, we normalize the previous productivity parameter to the sake of easy interpretation.
