Chih Ming Tan, "No One True Path: Uncovering The Interplay Between
Geography, Institutions, And Fractionalization In Economic Development",
Journal of Applied Econometrics, Vol. 25, No. 7, 2010, pp. 1100-1127.

The data are provided in two formats, Excel .xls and plain text. The file
cmt-data.xls, which is zipped in cmt-data-xls.zip, contains the data in
Excel format. The ASCII file cmt-data.txt, which is zipped in
cmt-data-text.zip, contains the data in DOS text format. For the second of
these (but not the first!), Unix/Linux users should use "unzip -a".

There are 147 observations on 74 countries. For most countries, there are
two periods; for Egypt, there is only one.

The variables are:

1. FROST5: Proportion of a country's land area that experiences more than 5
frost-days per month in winter.

2. ZTROPICS: Percentage of a country's land area that is classified as a
tropical eco-zone.

3. LCR100KM: Percentage of a country's land area within 100 km of ice-free
coast. Calculated using 100 km from ice-free coast or navigable river buffer
(created in ArcView using Plate Caree equidistant projection).

4. EXPROP8497: Risk of Expropriation of Private Investment; annual average
calculated over the years ranging 1984-97. This variable evaluates the risk
"outright confiscation and forced nationalization" of property. Lower
ratings "are given to countries where expropriation of private foreign
investment is a likely event."

5. ICRG8497: International Country Risk Guide Index; annual average
calculated over the years ranging 1984-97. This is a broad measure of
institutional quality which aggregates across five variables measuring (1)
the quality of the bureaucracy, (2) corruption in government, (3) rule of
law, (4) expropriation risk, and (5) repudiation of contracts by government.
Higher values of ICRG8497 correspond to better quality of institutions.

6. ELF60: Index of ethno-linguistic fractionalization, 1960. Measures the
probability that two randomly selected people from a given country will not
belong to the same ethno-linguistic group. Atlas Narodov Mira (1964).

7. ETHNIC: Measure of ethnic fractionalization from data which combines
racial and linguistic characteristics (based on data from the Encyclopedia
Britannica (2001) and other sources).

8. LANG: Measure of linguistic fractionalization based on data describing
shares of languages spoken as "mother tongues" (based on data from the
Encyclopedia Britannica (2001)).

9. RELIG: Measure of religious fractionalization (based on data from the
Encyclopedia Britannica (2001)).

10. MGDP0, MGDPT, MDY: MGDP0 and MGDPT are the log of real per capita GDP
for the start and end years for each country over two 20-year time
intervals, 1960-79 and 1980-99. MDY is the difference between MGDPT and
MGDP0. GDP figures used in this paper correspond to RGDPL in PWT 6.1. RGDPL
is obtained by adding up consumption, investment, government and exports,
and subtracting imports in any given year. The given year components are
obtained by extrapolating the 1996 values in international dollars from the
Geary aggregation using national growth rates. It is a fixed base index
where the reference year is 1996.

11. MNGD: log net depreciation rate (logs of averages taken across each of
the two time intervals, 1960-79 and 1980-99). The net depreciation rate
refers to the sum of the population growth rate, the rate of depreciation of
physical and human capital, and the exogenous rate of technological change.
By convention, the sum of the latter two variables is set to 0.05. Data for
population growth rates are from PWT 6.1.

12. MINV: log investment share (logs of averages taken across each of the
two time intervals, 1960-79 and 1980-99). Data from PWT 6.1.

13 MSCH15: log schooling (logs of averages taken across each of the two time
intervals, 1960-79 and 1980-99). The schooling variable corresponds to the
"average years of secondary and higher level schooling for males aged 15 and
above" calculated using data from Barro and Lee (2000)

GUIDE software: The software used in the paper can be found at this URL:

http://www.stat.wisc.edu/~loh/guide.html