How to develop a dataset for the gravity model of international Trade The gravity model of International trade is used to estimate the determinants of bilateral trade between countries.
In developing the dataset for the gravity model, do i need to manually pair the countries in terms of total value of exports/imports and the distance or i just need to enter them one by one with their corresponding figures and then STATA will pair them automatically or what?
I want to estimate the likely impacts of China's OBOR on bilateral trade with an African Country. Any advice on the approaches and techniques, I have never used stata nor do i have any skill in regression. Will appreciate.
 A: I'd recommend reading notes about the gravity model (and about running regressions, in case you aren't familiar with that).
Here's a PDF describing the gravity model of trade:  https://www.nber.org/papers/w16576.pdf.  Here's another one:  http://publications.ut-capitole.fr/15395/1/distance.pdf.
From the second PDF:  the model "describes the patterns of bilateral aggregate trade flows between two countries A and B as proportional to the gross national products of those countries and inversely proportional to the distance between them."
That suggests you'll have to build a dataset with one row of data for each pair of countries A and B.

I've attempted to answer this part of your question:  "do I need to manually pair the countries in terms of total value of exports / imports and the distance or I just need to enter them one by one with their corresponding figures and then STATA will pair them automatically or what?"
Getting Stata to run the desired regression is really a programming question.  Hopefully the links I've provided will help you figure out how to assemble your dataset.
