The World Economics and Politics (WEP) Dataverse is a queryable data resource for comparative and international political economy. It is developed jointly by the Niehaus Center and the Security and Political Economy (SPEC) Lab at the University of Southern California.
The WEP Dataverse serves the research community by making it easier for researchers to access information that is otherwise spread across dozens of distinct sources. The WEP Dataverse allows researchers to evaluate whether their findings are robust to alternative measures of key concepts; it also enables them to reproduce, challenge, and extend the findings of others, making social science more rigorous. By standardizing the process by which diverse data sources are cleaned and merged together, the Dataverse also reduces the opportunities for data management errors. Finally, the Dataverse also makes it easier for teachers of quantitative research methods to assign real-world exercises in class, allowing students to produce new knowledge in the course of their study.
The WEP Dataverse builds on the foundation of the Graham and Tucker IPE Data Resource, which was first made publicly available in 2015. It contains two separate datasets: a country-year dataset and a dyadic dataset. The country-year version of the Dataverse includes over 900 variables, covering politics, economics, geography, society, and culture. Data are available for more than 200 countries, with observations spanning from 1800 until 2018. The dyadic dataset combines bilateral data from 17 datasets spanning 220 reporting countries, with a collection of 60 variables.
The website for the WEP Dataverse is available or you can access the download page directly.