Measuring high-level corruption is subject to extensive scholarly and policy interest, which has achieved moderate progress in the last decade. This dataset presents four objective proxy measures of high-level corruption in public procurement: single bidding in competitive markets, the share of contracts with no published call for tender'' red flag, the share of contracts withnon-open procedure'' red flag, and share of contracts with ``tax haven'' red flag.
Using official government data on 4 million contracts in thirty-two European countries from 2011 to 2021, the authors directly operationalize a common definition of corruption: unjustified restriction of access to public contracts to favour a selected bidder.
Corruption indicators are calculated at the contract level, but produce aggregate indices consistent with well-established country-level indicators, and are also validated by micro-level tests.