CorruptionRadar exists to make sub-national corruption legible - to researchers writing the next generation of governance studies, to journalists covering local accountability, and to policymakers whose interventions are sub-national whether the data is or not.
We provide comprehensive, up-to-date information on sub-national corruption - built on rigorous, peer-reviewed methodology and made freely available. We believe that shedding light on corruption at local levels is a prerequisite for the accountability that national-level statistics alone cannot deliver.
Our cornerstone is the Subnational Corruption Index, which measures grand and petty corruption across 1,473 regions in 178 countries, summarizing the experiences and perceptions of 1.3 million individuals across 807 household surveys. The methodology has been published in Nature Scientific Data.
Every country in the database has its own profile, with time-series charts, regional breakdowns, and downloadable per-country slices in CSV format. Profiles are generated directly from the published Baseline and Comprehensive datasets.
The methodology page on this site walks through the index construction step by step - the source surveys, the harmonization, the imputation, and the validation - and links to the full data descriptor for those who want every detail.
When you use the SCD in published work, please cite the data descriptor:
Crombach, L., & Smits, J. (2024). The Subnational Corruption Database (SCD): Total, Petty and Grand Corruption in 1,473 Regions in 178 Countries Between 1995-2022. Scientific Data, 11. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-024-03505-8
Direct dataset citations should reference the Figshare deposit: doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.c.7061534.v1.
CorruptionRadar is led by Lamar Crombach and Jeroen Smits, with contributions from a wider network of researchers in development economics and governance.
Founder - Policy Officer, IMF Affairs - Dutch Ministry of Finance
Lamar is a Policy Officer for IMF Affairs at the Dutch Ministry of Finance. He completed his PhD at ETH Zürich in 2024 and his MSc in Economics, Behaviour & Policy at Radboud University in 2018. His research interests include political economy, anti-corruption, development economics, and the economic consequences of demography. He also runs HumanitarianMatters Consulting.
Co-author - Radboud University
Jeroen is professor of economic and human development at the Department of Economics, Radboud University. His research interests span all forms of inequality, development, social cohesion, and the construction of large databases and knowledge instruments. He has published over 100 research papers across demography, economics, sociology, public health, medicine, and human biology, and founded the Global Data Lab.