The HRV Transparency project examines the causes and consequences of government transparency both through theoretical and empirical approaches with the measure of government transparency or HRV Index. The HRV index contrasts with other measurements because it relies on a precise and narrow conception of transparency: the disclosure of policy-relevant information by the government to the public.
The HRV Index focuses on the availability of credible aggregate economic data. It does so by examining patterns of missing data and treating transparency as the latent term which best reflects the tendency to disclose. This measure provides observations for 125 countries from 1980-2010 and can be used to measure relationships between transparency and other issues such as democracy, accountability, or political instability. Transparency encompasses many dimensions. The HRV index measures a specific aspect of government transparency: reporting national data to international organizations. Rather than rely on expert but subjective judgments, the measure is based on objective criteria. The HRV team uses "Item Response Theory", a highly sophisticated and computationally intense method to estimate transparency. This method assigns different weights for reporting distinct measures of the economy, based on how many other countries actually reported data on the measure, and how much a country distinguishes itself from other countries by reporting data on a given measure. (Technically, the model estimates "difficulty'' and "discrimination'' parameters for each economic variable.)
The model analyzes 240 measures of the economy consistently collected by the World Bank's World Development Indicators. Since the World Bank obtains its data from other international agencies that, in turn, obtain their data from national statistical offices, the HRV measure is a valid indicator of governments' efforts to collect and disseminate economically relevant information. Moreover, because the World Bank omits data considered "questionable'', this index reflects the collection and dissemination of generally credible information about a country's national economy.