manytrade

manytrade is a data package in the many packages universe. It currently includes an ensemble of datasets on international trade agreements, and states’ membership or other relationships to those agreements, including the original treaty texts stored in the HUGGO dataset. Building on existing trade datasets such as the Global Preferential Trade Agreements Database (GPTAD) and the Design of Trade Agreements Dataset (DESTA), the AIGGO dataset in the agreements datacube also includes information on the accession conditions and procedures as well as more precise dates of signature extracted from the treaty texts. Please also check out {manydata} for more about the other packages in the ‘many packages’ universe.

How to install:

We’ve made it easier than ever to install and start analysing global governance data in R. Simply install the core package, manydata, and then you can discover, install and update various ‘many packages’ from the console.

# prints a list of the publicly available data packages currently available
# manydata::call_packages()
# manydata::call_packages("manytrade") # downloads and installs the named package

Data included

Once you have installed the package, you can see the different datasets included in a specific datacube in the {manytrade} package using the following function.

# manydata::call_sources("manytrade", "agreements")

Working with ensembles of related data has many advantages for robust analysis. Just take a look at our vignettes here.

The ‘many packages’ universe

The many packages universe is aimed at collecting, connecting and correcting network data across issue-domains of global governance.

While the packages in the many universe can and do include novel data, much of what they offer involves standing on the shoulders of giants. The ‘many packages’ universe endeavours to be as transparent as possible about where data comes from, how it has been coded and/or relabeled, and who has done the work. As such, we make it easy to cite both the particular datasets you use by listing the official references in the function above, as well as the package providers for their work assembling the data by using the function below.

citation("manytrade")

## To cite manytrade in publications use:
## 
##   J. Hollway. Trade agreements for manydata. 2021.
## 
## A BibTeX entry for LaTeX users is
## 
##   @Manual{,
##     title = {manytrade: International Trade Agreements for manydata},
##     author = {James Hollway},
##     year = {2021},
##     url = {https://github.com/globalgov/manytrade},
##   }

Contributing

{manypkgs} also makes it easy to contribute in lots of different ways.

If you have already developed a dataset salient to this package, please reach out by flagging this as an issue for us, or by forking, further developing the package yourself, and opening a pull request so that your data can be used easily.

If you have collected or developed other data that may not be best for this package, but could be useful within the wider ‘many packages’ universe, manypkgs includes a number of functions that make it easy to create a new ‘many package’ and populate it with clean, consistent global governance data.

If you have any other ideas about how this package or the ‘many packages’ universe more broadly might better facilitate your empirical analysis, we’d be very happy to hear from you.