Aid Quality and Donor Rankings
This paper offers new measures of aid quality covering 38 bilateral and multilateral donors, as well as new insights about the robustness and usefulness of such measures. The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the follow-up 2008 Accra...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/main?menuPK=64187510&pagePK=64193027&piPK=64187937&theSitePK=523679&menuPK=64187510&searchMenuPK=64187283&siteName=WDS&entityID=000158349_20100504103946 http://hdl.handle.net/10986/3777 |
| Summary: | This paper offers new measures of aid
quality covering 38 bilateral and multilateral donors, as
well as new insights about the robustness and usefulness of
such measures. The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid
Effectiveness and the follow-up 2008 Accra Agenda for Action
have focused attention on common donor practices that reduce
the development impact of aid. Using 18 underlying
indicators that capture these practices -- derived from the
OECD-DAC's Survey for Monitoring the Paris Declaration,
the new AidData database, and the DAC aid tables -- the
authors construct an overall aid quality index and four
coherently defined sub-indexes on aid selectivity,
alignment, harmonization, and specialization. Compared with
earlier indicators used in donor rankings, this indicator
set is more comprehensive and representative of the range of
donor practices addressed in the Paris Declaration,
improving the validity, reliability, and robustness of
rankings. One of the innovations is to increase the validity
of the aid quality indicators by adjusting for recipient
characteristics, donor aid volumes, and other factors.
Despite these improvements in data and methodology, the
authors caution against overinterpretation on overall
indexes such as these. Alternative plausible assumptions
regarding weights or the inclusion of additional indicators
can still produce marked shifts in the ranking of some
donors, so that small differences in overall rankings are
not meaningful. Moreover, because the performance of some
donors varies considerably across the four sub-indexes,
these sub-indexes may be more useful than the overall index
in identifying donors relative strengths and weaknesses. |
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