Revealed Factor Intensity Indices at the Product Level

This paper describes a data-intensive methodology to generate indices that indicate “revealed” factor intensity of traded goods, at the most disaggregated level of product classification (SITC 5-digit or HS 6-digit). We construct the indices by calculating, for each good, a weighted average of the factor abundance of the countries that export this good, where the weights are variants of Balassa’s Revealed Comparative Advantage index. In doing so, we take advantage of recent improvements in the availability of data on aggregate national endowments of primary factors (capital, education and labour force) using, inter alia, Summer and Heston’s PWT (version 6.2), Barro-Lee’s latest database, the World Bank and COMTRADE databases. The resulting indices are available on the UNCTAD website.