The degree of globalization refers to how connected a country is with the rest of the world. The links can be economic in terms of international trade and international investment; social in terms of people mobility and the communications between people across borders; and political in term of the engagement of the country and its institutions in the global political realm.

The best available measures for globalization are compiled and published by the KOF Institute in Switzerland, which is part of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. By the way, KOF stands for "Konjunkturforschungsstelle." The economic, social, and political indexes for globalization are based on a large number of specific indicators from different sources. The various indicators are combined into an overall index from 0 (low degree of globalization) to 100 (high degree of globalization). There is also an overall index of globalization that combines the three indexes into one.

A particularly nice feature of the data is that they go back to the early 1970's so one can track the opening (or closing) of a particular country vis-a-vis the rest of the world. The length of the data series and the large number of countries covered also allows for research with a relatively large data set. Moreover, the data are updated on an annual basis.
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