Aid Quality and Donor Rankings

Knack, Stephen ; Rogers, F. Halsey ; Eubank, Nicholas

关键词: ADJUSTMENT;    AID;    AID AGENCIES;    AID FLOWS;    BIASES;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-5290
RP-ID  :  WPS5290

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

This paper offers new measures of aidquality covering 38 bilateral and multilateral donors, aswell as new insights about the robustness and usefulness ofsuch measures. The 2005 Paris Declaration on AidEffectiveness and the follow-up 2008 Accra Agenda for Actionhave focused attention on common donor practices that reducethe development impact of aid. Using 18 underlyingindicators that capture these practices -- derived from theOECD-DAC's Survey for Monitoring the Paris Declaration,the new AidData database, and the DAC aid tables -- theauthors construct an overall aid quality index and fourcoherently defined sub-indexes on aid selectivity,alignment, harmonization, and specialization. Compared withearlier indicators used in donor rankings, this indicatorset is more comprehensive and representative of the range ofdonor practices addressed in the Paris Declaration,improving the validity, reliability, and robustness ofrankings. One of the innovations is to increase the validityof the aid quality indicators by adjusting for recipientcharacteristics, donor aid volumes, and other factors.Despite these improvements in data and methodology, theauthors caution against overinterpretation on overallindexes such as these. Alternative plausible assumptionsregarding weights or the inclusion of additional indicatorscan still produce marked shifts in the ranking of somedonors, so that small differences in overall rankings arenot meaningful. Moreover, because the performance of somedonors varies considerably across the four sub-indexes,these sub-indexes may be more useful than the overall indexin identifying donorsrelative strengths and weaknesses.