Random reference of the day: Walter, Stefanie. 2021. “The Backlash Against Globalization.” Annual Review of Political Science 24 (1): 421–42. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-041719-102405.
I have provided an Excel version of the Freedom House datasets in the R package “freedomhouse” here. The added value is that it tidied the data from their spreadsheets and I added the ISO codes fo the countries and the justification text for each sub-item where those were available. Check here for more details.
The tables provided here were reshaped under Cobb's Normal Form, and in some cases contain corrections that I explain in the project repository. The specific sources are the Gravity database from the Center for Prospective Studies and International Information (CEPII), the International Trade and Production Database for Estimation (ITPD-E) and the Dynamic Gravity Database (DGD) from the US International Trade Commission (USITC), and the Structural Gravity Database (SGD) from the World Trade Organization (WTO).
Since 2017 I've maintained Open Trade Statistics, a project created with the intention to lower the barrier to working with international economic trade data. It includes a public API, a dashboard, and an R package for data retrieval. The project started when I was affected by the fact that many Latin American Universities have limited or no access to the United Nations Commodity Trade Statistics Database (UN COMTRADE).
OTS provides a curated database derived from UN COMTRADE. I can provide a full SQL dump of the database or share subsets of the database for the period 2002-2020 aggregated by countries or by products up to a detail of six digits in the Harmonised System revision 2012.
After contacting UN COMTRADE, and suggesting to them my idea of sharing trade data but keeping commercial purposes out of the scope of the project, I got an authorization to share curated versions of their datasets.
Check SQL Databases for students and educators if you need access to PostgreSQL databases.
Publicly accessible databases often impose query limits or require registration. Even when I maintain public and limit-free APIs, I never wanted to host a public database because the connection string can be problematic for users.