9/11/2009 8:07:14 AM By
E.J. Reedy
The Cross-country Historical Adoption of Technology (CHAT) dataset covers the diffusion of 104 technologies in 161 countries during the last 200 years. It is an aggregation of some earlier technology diffusion datasets and has most recent year of coverage as 2003. The data is available for
download. Interested potential users should review a
new overview paper published through the National Bureau of Economic Research.
The authors summarize their definition of technologies as follows:
"They [technologies] are either: (i) the number of capital goods specifically related to accomplishing particular tasks, (ii) the amounts of particular tasks that have been accomplished, (iii) the number of users of a particular manner to accomplish a task. These three types of measures are best illustrated with three examples. (i) The number of sail ships (measured in tonnage) in use in a country; (ii) Metric tons of steel produced using blastâoxygen steel furnaces; (iii) the number of households that subscribe to cable tv services."