Porto Massimiliano. Using R for Trade Policy Analysis: R Codes for the UNCTAD and WTO Practical Guide

2nd Edition. — Springer, 2023. — 172 p. — ISBN: 978-3-031-35043-6.This book explains the best practices of the UNCTAD & WTO for trade analysis to the R users community. It shows how to replicate the UNCTAD & WTO's Stata codes in the Practical Guide to Trade Policy Analysis by using R. Applications and exercises are chosen from the Practical Guide to Trade Policy Analysis and explains how to implement the codes in R. This book targets readers with a basic knowledge of R. It is particularly suitable for Stata users. This edition has been updated and expanded to include updated R code and visualization tools.This book is a second edition. The reasons for publishing a second edition are mainly two. First, the WTO has changed the location of the files to download that are used in this book. Therefore, the link to the data files in the first edition is not working anymore. Second, some R functions used in the first edition are deprecated. Therefore, it was necessary to replace the link to the data and those deprecated functions. However, these are not the only two changes I have made to this second edition. While reading again the first edition, I was thinking about how I could provide more value to a reader who is approaching R for the first time. Even though I placed an appendix in the first edition with some basic information regarding R, I realize that that information is not enough for a beginner given that the book immediately starts with some advanced operations. I show alternatives to accomplish the same task in R that mainly use base R functions, functions from the tidyr and dplyr packages, and functions from the data.table package. You may choose the functions you are more comfortable with to replicate the chapters in the book.