The original working paper of this has now been published (or at least is an Article in Press), in the Journal of Comparative Economics. There are, of course, some notable differences between the original Working Paper version of this, and the final one here. In particular, there were changes to the index itself, and so I have put an excel file of the new indicator on the ‘Datasets’ page. I would highly recommend you use this new one, rather than the Working Paper version. Although I may say more on this later, at this stage, I’ll just quote the abstract:
“Interest in the political and economic consequences of transparency has grown significantly over the past decade. The literature, however, has been hampered by methodological issues over what actually constitutes ‘transparency’, as well as the lack of a quantitative indicator that has substantial coverage across countries, and time. This paper uses a relatively new methodology, similar to Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, to construct composite indicators of what we call Informational Transparency, and Accountability. These new indicators use data from 29 sources, with scores being derived annually between 1980 and 2010 across more than 190 countries.”
Andrew Williams 