Global spending on zoonotic surveillance programs: a country-scale dataset based on USAspending

This dataset provides detailed information on U.S. federal spending for the cost of zoonotic disease monitoring and surveillance programs. Data are gathered from the USAspending.gov database, an open data source that allows to track how federal money is allocated and spent across various countries. We retrieved information  at country-level over the period 2008-2023 for more than 130 countries.

Our aim was to estimate the total yearly spending from US-based organisations on zoonotic disease surveillance worldwide. Hence, we focussed on programs related to zoonotic disease monitoring and surveillance funded by the following agencies: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Bureau of Global Health, Security and Diplomacy.

The dataset consists on:

(i) country code;

(ii) country name;

(iii) fiscal year;

(iv) Recipient ($), which is the total amount of funds allocated to a given country in a specific year, referring to the legal business addresses of organizations that are awarded with federal contracts, grants or financial assistance; 

(v) Performance ($), which is the total amount of funds associated with the country, specifying the local where most of the work takes place, e.g. for a manufacturing contract this indicates the main place where items are produced; 

(vi) Spending ($), which is the sum of recipient and performance funds for a country for each available year. 

This dataset can serve as a valuable resource not only for researchers, but also for decision-makers as it supports the analysis of federal spending patterns. Despite the data account for U.S. spending for (excluding extranational spending of other big investors, such as the European Union), they are produced based on a consistent approach providing comparable information among years and countries. The usefulness and applicability of this dataset is indeed manifold: it can be used for examining the trends in funding distribution and outcomes, assessing the effectiveness of spending policies, and analyzing the outcome of investment programs over time. Likewise, analysis of trends in spending can be crucial to improve public services, such as healthcare, by identifying gaps and weaknesses, which may lead to the identification of more targeted actions for reducing the risk of zoonotic disease. Moreover, these data can be exploited to forecast economic trends and identify areas which are underfunded and might require future investment.