Importing Common Constants to R and Python
You should consider storing this sort of data into a format that is more universally accessible.  I would suggest either JSON or YAML. JSON can be readily parsed by both R and Python

Your data would look something like:

{
    "FIRST_YEAR": 1952, 
    "IV_TYPES": [
        ["p", 6], 
        ["n", 6], 
        ["w", 4]
    ]
}