Replication Data for: How transparent are aid agencies to their citizens? Introducing the Citizen Aid Transparency Dataset

Existing measures of aid transparency overwhelmingly focus on how much information donor agencies are willing to share with the international donor community, overlooking that transparency is about increasing access of information to citizens in order to improve government accountability. In this article, we present the Citizen Aid Transparency Dataset (CATD), which includes information on 212 aid agencies across 37 donor countries collected via the public face of aid agencies, their websites. The CATD contains 120 indicators measuring how transparent individual aid agencies are regarding both aid agency governance (i.e., organizational structure and institutional rules for implementing aid) and aid agency practice (i.e., outputs like aid flows and aid evaluations). Through factor and correlation analysis, we demonstrate that the CATD captures a different dimension of transparency than existing transparency measures. We also demonstrate that aid agency transparency varies as much within donor countries as across donor countries, and that there are important quality differences across agencies with respect to the recency, breadth, depth, and accessibility of data provided.