Iran–BRICS+ Trade, Political Alignment and Resilience Dataset, 2000–2025
Description
This dataset provides a bilateral country-year panel for analysing Iran’s commercial and political relationships with the current BRICS+ members over the period 2000–2025. It was constructed for the study of Iran’s long-run trade reorientation, political alignment, partner concentration, and economic resilience within the enlarged BRICS framework. The core dataset covers Iran’s bilateral relationships with Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Egypt, Ethiopia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Indonesia. It combines merchandise trade flows with political-alignment and macroeconomic variables. Bilateral trade measures include total trade, exports, imports, and log-transformed trade values. Political relations are represented using annual United Nations General Assembly ideal-point information, from which bilateral political distance and political proximity indicators are derived. The dataset also contains constructed measures developed for the associated research. These include a bilateral relationship index and the Political–Commercial Conversion Gap (PCCG), designed to capture whether political proximity is advancing more rapidly than observed commercial integration, or vice versa. Aggregate annual files additionally report Iran’s trade share with BRICS+ economies, partner concentration measured by the Herfindahl–Hirschman Index (HHI), and coverage-adjusted trade series used for descriptive analysis and long-horizon forecasting. Macroeconomic controls include partner and Iranian GDP, population and trade-related indicators where available, together with Brent crude oil prices. Merchandise trade data are obtained primarily from UN Comtrade, with mirror-reported trade used where appropriate. Macroeconomic series are drawn from World Bank-based sources and Our World in Data, political-alignment information from UNGA ideal-point data, and oil-price information from FRED/EIA sources. The accompanying replication files include the final bilateral panel, aggregate annual datasets, coverage-adjusted historical series, variable codebook, source documentation, and the R pipeline used to reconstruct the data. The dataset is intended for research on BRICS enlargement, sanctions resilience, geoeconomic fragmentation, trade reorientation, political–commercial alignment, and long-run scenario analysis.