I’ve been playing around with Cartodb and the fairly new, and really useful, website www.resourcecontracts.org/
Click on the map below to see which countries disclosed the most contracts :
The clear ‘winner’ is Peru with 270 contracts, the next one down is The Philippines with 93 contracts in the database. (This forced me to change the scale a little bit and take Peru out of the progressive color pattern.)
The publication of more contracts does not necessarily equate with higher transparency in that country. For example, in some countries, licenses are used instead of contracts, so that the terms governing natural resource extraction are set in law rather than in contracts. Another variable is that some contracts do not include the most important provisions, which are kept in the appendix.
Furthermore, this database might not include all the contracts published worldwide, so there might also be some bias there. Something to keep mind in any quantitative analysis that would use this database.
