UC Davis economist Robert Feenstra has earned international acclaim for his unique collection of statistics that track how much nations earn from trading globally in diamonds, cars and ice. Now, he can add to those accolades the Bernhard-Harms Prize from the Kiel Institute for World Economics.

Through his extensive international research, Feenstra has created a gargantuan body of trade data at UC Davis that is accessible to scholars, policymakers and analysts hungry for his information.

"Practically nobody had used these data before I put it together," Feenstra says. "I was able to change the nature of research of international trade economics from being simply theoretical to being based on real numbers."

In receiving the Bernhard-Harms Prize, Feenstra is in good company. The German Kiel institute awards the prize every two years to outstanding economists in the field of international economic research.

High-powered scholars

In the past, the prize, which includes a 25,000 euro endowment (about $30,300), has been given to high-powered scholars who have made an impact on international economic and political policy.

They include Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and Martin Feldstein of Harvard and president and CEO of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

In fact, Feenstra directs the International Trade and Investment Program within Feldstein's bureau, considered the nation's leading nonprofit economic research organization. Feenstra is one of the few West Coast directors of an organization whose researchers have included 16 of the 31 American Nobel Prize winners in economics and six of the past chairmen of the President's Council of Economic Advisers.

Thanks to Feenstra, UC Davis houses the Center for International Data, the huge body of data sets he has gathered over the course of more than two decades. They cover U.S. imports and exports at the level of individual commodities — like basmati rice, bicycle seats, computer chips or missiles — as well as detailed imports and exports for nearly 200 countries.

UC Davis makes the center's data available not only to economists at the National Bureau of Economic Research, but to national and international economists, sociologists, political scientists and other scholars who need quantitative information to conduct high-quality research.

Feenstra's research led to his graduate-level textbook in 2004, Advanced International Trade, considered state-of-the-art on the topic and used by economics departments across the nation to train future policy analysts and researchers.

Exploring trade

In 2000, Feenstra broadened his research focus and became a co-principle investigator for an economics research project at the University of Pennsylvania, funded by the National Science Foundation. The Penn World Tables were established by Professors Emeriti Alan Heston and Robert Summers to offer comparisons of standards of living across the world. But while the tables are respected throughout the economic-policy world, little international trade data have been used in the calculations, the economics professor says.

There was a time when using trade as the basis for wealth was a novel idea for economists trying to add up the relative wealth — or poverty — of any given nation, Feenstra says.

"This is actually an old problem in economics — finding a good data set of real gross domestic product numbers," Feenstra says. For instance, economists have been leery of using the ever-fluctuating exchange rates of national currencies to compute the standard of living in a country.

The question, then, was how an economist determines the per capita wealth of any country. This is where Feenstra hopes to add value in the next five years — by connecting the dots between trade from particular nations and living standards.

The Penn World Table's standard-of-living calculations have become highly valuable to organizations like the World Bank and United Nations. When calculating aid packages, they need to determine who are the world's poorest countries.

"This type of data can be political, because aid is given in relation to real gross domestic product per capita," Feenstra says. "Some countries want to look poorer than they are."

Collegial atmosphere

Feenstra praises the particularly collegial atmosphere at UC Davis, where he collaborates with sociologists and political scientists. He has a new book coming out in January 2006, Emergent Economics, Divergent Paths: Economic Organizations and International Trade in South Korea and Taiwan, co-authored by former UC Davis sociologist Gary Hamilton, now at the University of Washington.

The book relies on Feenstra's trade insights and Hamilton's understanding of organizational behavior to contrast the differing business social styles in Taiwan, a society emphasizing small family businesses, with South Korea, where large corporations dominate.

Beyond leading UC Davis' Center for International Data, Feenstra also directs the Pacific Rim Business and Development Program. He also took on temporarily, for one year, directorship of the UC Davis Institute of Governmental Affairs.

In the past decade, Feenstra has become intrigued by another hot topic in international business — the impacts of outsourcing on wages for the industry workers both in the original country and the new country.

In the past decade, Feenstra has become intrigued by another hot topic in international business — the impacts of outsourcing on wages for workers both in the original country and the new country.

In 1986, Feenstra shifted his own labor across the country to UC Davis after five years as an assistant professor at Columbia University. Even while pursuing his doctorate at MIT in Boston, the Vancouver, B.C. native and his wife, Gail, had dreams to move back west — Gail had finished her undergraduate degree at UC Davis. She has since developed a career as a food systems analyst at the UC Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program.

During his 20 years at UC Davis, he has raised two children — a daughter now at UCLA and a son at Davis High School — and enjoyed bicycling to work where he focuses on challenging international economics issues.