The Subnational Corruption Database: Grand and petty corruption in 1,473 regions of 178 countries, 1995-2022

The Subnational Corruption Database (SCD) The Subnational Corruption Database (SCD) provides the levels of total, grand, and petty corruption for 1,473 subnational regions within 178 countries. The SCD also offers subnational versions of existing corruption indices. The SCD contains three different data files: “Baseline Dataset SCI”, “Comprehensive Dataset SCI”, and “SUBCPI and SUBCCI Dataset”. Each of these files is available in three different versions; for SPSS, STATA and MS Excel. The dataset also contains two Stata syntax files: “From Raw Dataset to Baseline Dataset” and “From Baseline Dataset to Comprehensive Datasets”. The Baseline Dataset SCI file contains the subnational and national values of the Subnational Corruption Index (SCI) and its two components: the Subnational Petty Corruption Index (SPCI) and the Subnational Grand Corruption Index (SGCI). This dataset is most suitable for analyses. It contains 6,701 area-years of corruption data based on 807 standardized and harmonized household surveys. The Comprehensive Dataset SCI file contains the subnational and national values of the SCI after applying methods of inter- and extrapolation. This dataset is most suitable for descriptive analyses such as within-year comparisons. The number of subnational regions varies between countries and can reach up to 37 regions for Nigeria, with an average of 8.3 regions. The years for which the SCI is available are similar to those of the World Bank’s Control of Corruption (CCI) (from 1995-2022) The total number of country-years for which SCI data is available is 4930. The SUBCPI and SUBCCI Dataset also contains subnational and national values for all countries and years (from 1995-2022). In this dataset, we superimposed the subnational variation of our SCI around two existing measures of corruption: the World Bank Control of Corruption Index (CCI) (1995-2022) and Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) (2012-2022). The From Raw Dataset to Baseline Dataset Stata do-file shows the syntax steps made to get from the raw dataset to our Baseline Dataset SCI. The raw dataset contains the underlying questions of all sources at the individual level, after combining all subnational region definitions under one coding scheme. The raw dataset is not available given copyright. The From Baseline Dataset to Comprehensive Datasets Stata do-file shows the syntax required to move from our Baseline Dataset SCI to our Comprehensive Dataset SCI and SUBCPI and SUBCCI Dataset. A detailed description of the SCD can be found in the data descriptor paper “The Subnational Corruption Database (SCD): Total, Petty and Grand Corruption in 1,473 Regions in 178 Countries Between 1995-2022”. The most recent version of the SCD is available at www.corruptionradar.com. All data files contain region classifications that coincide with those of the Global Data Lab (www.globaldatalab.org), an independent and data research center with the largest subnational databases for LMICs on socioeconomic data.