The Swiss Economic Institute has just released the 2010 version of their “Index of Globalization”:http://globalization.kof.ethz.ch/static/pdf/press_release_2010_en.pdf. Reading into the fine print you quickly learn that the 2010 edition actually only includes data through 2007. Nevertheless, this is sure to be a valuable source of data for scholars for three reasons.
First, the range of the data is very impressive. The current version runs from 1970-2007, and covers 138 countries (although of course not every country is featured in every year). Second, the Institute has done a very nice job of making the data easily available “here”:http://globalization.kof.ethz.ch/ in a simple excel spreadsheet that I was able to get up and running in Stata in a matter of minutes. Third, they include in that excel spreadsheet the various components of the overall globalization index, and they provide a “series of pdf”:http://globalization.kof.ethz.ch/ documents on the methods used to compile the index.
To give an example of what you can do with these data, here are two figures comparing globalization in post-communist countries in 1991 and 2007. We can see how while the whole post-communist world has become more globalized since the collapse of communism, the rough ordering of the countries has remained quite constant, with the former Soviet Republics (excluding the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia) primarily occupying the left-hand portion of both figures and the “Visegrad 4” of Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic as the most globalized. (The dataset lacks data for Czechoslovakia, so in 1991 we only have Poland and Hungary representing this group.) One interesting point to note is the shift of Russia from the right hand side of the 1991 figure (looking more the Baltics than other former Soviet Republics at that point) to the left hand side of the 2007 figure.
