Aid Intensity and the Commitment-Compliance Gap in Human Rights

This repository provides datasets and replication materials for a research project on foreign aid intensity and human rights compliance.

Project Overview

The project examines whether higher levels of Net Official Development Assistance (ODA) per capita are associated with a divergence between:

• formal human rights commitments, measured through ICCPR ratification
• observed political repression outcomes, measured through the Political Terror Scale (PTS)

The central construct is the Commitment-Compliance Gap, which captures repression conditional on formal treaty commitment.

Repository Contents

File	Description
Dataset_final_upload.csv	Final merged panel dataset used for regression analysis.
NetODA_upload.csv	Net ODA source data.
PTS-2025_upload.xlsx	Political Terror Scale source data.
OP+PTS+Gap_upload.xlsx	Intermediate dataset combining ICCPR commitment, PTS, and constructed gap variables.

Key Variables

The final merged dataset includes:

Variable	Description
member	Country name.
year	Observation year.
Gap_A, Gap_B, Gap_C	Alternative measures of the commitment-compliance gap.
ODA	Aid intensity measure.
GDP, INV, IMP, INF	Economic covariates.
SDC, CUR, BNK, QOG, DUR, MIL	Additional political and institutional covariates.

Data Notes

• The files are provided as public research materials for transparency and replication.
• Dataset_final_upload.csv is the main analysis-ready panel dataset.
• Raw and intermediate files are retained to document how the final dataset was constructed.

Citation

If you use this repository, please cite the associated research project and acknowledge the original data sources where appropriate, including the Political Terror Scale and World Bank ODA data.