Dataset of Urban Transport Infrastructure Finance in the Global South, 1967-2025

This dataset compiles urban transport infrastructure projects across over 130 countries in the Global South, spanning 1967–2025. It was constructed by harmonizing, deduplicating, and enriching four international development finance databases: the IATI Datastore, the World Bank Private Participation in Infrastructure (PPI) database, the OECD Mobilisation of Private Finance for Development survey, and the AidData Global Chinese Development Finance Dataset v3.0.

Each project record includes a harmonized transport mode classification (roads, railways, public transport services, active transport, air, water, cargo, multimodal), financing details (instrument type, flow classification, and project value in constant 2021 USD), provider and recipient information, geographic identifiers (country, UN subregion, matched city coordinates), and binary thematic tags for private sector involvement, cost recovery mechanisms, electric mobility, informal transport, and active transport. Country-level control variables from the World Development Indicators and World Governance Indicators are joined by recipient country and year.

The dataset supports research on the political economy of transport infrastructure finance, patterns of private sector participation in urban mobility, the geography of development finance flows, and the evolution of financing instruments across regions and decades.