The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's Trade Analysis & Information System, TRAINS, contains information on Trade Control Measures (tariff, para-tariff and non-tariff measures) at tariff line level for 137 countries. Boston College has purchased disaggregated tariff information from UNCTAD's TRAINS database for the years 1988 through 2001, inclusive. We have data for 137 countries for at least one year, counting the European Union as a single country. Please note that the links on this page provide access to TRAINS 9, the most recent version of the data. In order to see previous versions for a complete understanding of what is available, please see: trains. The Stata data set "coverage" shows the years for which data are available for each country. To access this dataset from within the BC community use,
Coverage
TRAINS reports tariff data at the six-digit level of the HS product classification; thus, we have tariffs for roughly 5000 "products" for each country. Countries use a finer product classification when reporting tariffs to UNCTAD. Thus, multiple tariff "lines" underlie each 6-digit aggregate. A list of the hierarchy of six-digit classification codes for 1996 is available as a Stata dataset:
hs1996
The data themselves are found in fourteen separate Stata data sets, named "trains9_hs6_1988" through "trains9_hs6_2001". These data sets contain the following variables (Stata variable names in brackets):
The datafiles, in Stata format, may be accessed over the web (within the BC network) using the following web address:
http://fmwww.bc.edu/VDC/trains9/trains9_hs6_YYYY.dta.gz
where YYYY is a four-digit year. These files range in size from 1 Mb to 23 Mb per year.
Our license limits use of the TRAINS data to people affiliated with Boston College.
The TRAINS data can be difficult to use. Douglas Marcouiller would be glad to help in their interpretation.