Post-colonial trade between Russia and former Soviet republics: back to big brother?

4 Data and empirical models
4.1 Data
We utilize a panel of 37 countries, over the years 1995–2011 inclusive. Our data 
are bilateral by country pairs, and covers Russia and 9 other CIC+ countries, as 
well as two former Soviet republics which are not associated with the CIS, and 25 
other countries (see Table 
1
for the list of countries). Overall, the sample has 23,273 
observations, although we had slightly fewer than this for logs of trade flow and 
trade cost, which meant our sample for estimation had to be reduced. Sadly, data on 
1989–1992 are either missing or if reported are unreliable; these problems also apply 
to the data for the period till 1994 which is characterized by hyperinflation. Bilateral 
trade flows in 2007 US dollars and tariff rates, effectively applied tariff rates, were 
obtained from WITS (
www.wits.org
). This contains both the COMTRADE and 
TRAINS bilateral databases, both of which contain some of the necessary data, as 
COMTRADE covers only WTO members, while TRAINS covers all CA countries, 
18
The WTO list their membership on 
https ://www.wto.org/engli sh/thewt o_e/whati s_e/tif_e/org6_e.htm
.
Economic Change and Restructuring (2021) 54:877–918
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but aggregates the EU into one single region. GDP levels were obtained from the 
IMF’s International Financial Statistics Database (
www.imf.org
), while geographic 
distances between capital cities of the countries and standard gravity dummies for 
common colonial history, language, borders were obtained from CEPII (
www.cepii 
.fr
). Additional dummies for landlockedness and RTA membership were constructed 
manually and included to the model. Further details about variables are in Table 
9
in 
‘
Appendix
,’ and a listing of countries and country groupings is in Table 
1
. Table 
4
 
shows summary statistics for all variables.