Country Ruggedness and Geographical Data (2012)

Data source: Nunn and Puga

The dataset of terrain ruggedness and other geographical characteristics of countries was created by Nathan Nunn and Diego Puga for their article `Ruggedness: The blessing of bad geography in Africa', published in the Review of Economics and Statistics 94(1), February 2012: 20-36.

Dataset type
Cross-section
Dataset level
Country
Last updated by source
2010-11-12

Citation

When using this dataset, please cite as:

• Nunn, N., & Puga, D. (2012). Ruggedness: The blessing of bad geography in Africa. Review of Economics and Statistics, 94(1), 20–36.

Variables in this dataset

Browse variables and select them for download.

Percentage of desert in 2012
QoG code: nunn_desert

The percentage of the land surface area of each country covered by sandy desert, dunes, rocky or lava flows, was calculated on the basis of the desert layer of the Collins Bartholomew World Premium di ...

Average distance the to nearest ice-free coast (1000 km). To calculate the average distance to the closest ice-free coast in each country, Nunn and Puga first compute the distance to the nearest ice-f ...

Within 100 km of ice-free coast. On the basis of the same data used to calculate the average distance to the nearest ice-free coast, Nunn and Puga calculate the percentage of the land surface area of ...

This is the Terrain Ruggedness Index originally devised by Riley, DeGloria, and Elliot (1999) to quantify topographic heterogeneity in wildlife habitats providing concealment for prey and lookout post ...

Tropical climate. Using detailed temperature and precipitation data from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia and the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre of the German Nunn ...