The Geo-Political Distance Data Repository

Welcome to the Geo-Political Distance (GPD) Data Repository. The purpose of this website is to disseminate data on new country-to-country distances and international taxation from the paper "Barriers to Global Capital Allocation" (Pellegrino, Spolaore and Wacziarg, 2021), along with replication code and related measures of fractionalization.

Available Datasets

Culture  (Values and Beliefs)

Panel measures of cultural distance between countries and fractionalization, based on the World Values Survey (WVS).

A new accurate, complete and up-to-date dataset of country distances and borders, based on GeoNames.

Measures of linguistic distance between countries and fractionalization, based on data from Ethnologue, CogNet, GLED.

A novel, wide coverage research dataset on bilateral (country-to-country) treaty-adjusted tax rates on capital.

Panel measures of country religious distances and fractionalization, based on the World Religion Database (WRD).

Bilateral databases by other researchers and data derived by ourselves, used in Pellegrino, Spolaore & Wacziarg (2021).