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Round-table on EU aid effectiveness
1. On 14 June, the European Development Cooperation Strengthening Programme (EDCSP) hosted a private roundtable at ODI, bringing together specialists on aid effectiveness and EU development cooperation. The purpose was to discuss recent work quantifying the benefits of measures to improve aid effectiveness, and evaluating indices of donor performance. A programme and a list of participants are in Appendix 1. The meeting was chaired by Simon Maxwell.
2. Arne Bigsten opened the event by giving a presentation (Appendix 2) summarising the findings of his report (written jointly with Jean Philippe Platteau and Sven Tengstam) – ‘The Aid Effectiveness Agenda: The benefits of going ahead’. The report estimates the gains deriving from the implementation of the Paris Declaration (PD) and the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) by the EU and the Member States. It finds that total benefits of implementation of the PD and AAA by the EU could amount to €5 billion, or almost 6% of EU aid. Of this total, €3.2 billion comes from direct gains and €1.8 billion from indirect gains. Further gains of €7.8 billion (9% of EU aid) could be realised if aid were reallocated across countries so as to maximise the impact on poverty reduction.
3. Arne discussed the practical implications of the analysis, looking at what aid policies could be changed and coordinated, and focusing on the issue areas:
i. The saving in transactions costs associated with:
a. Reducing the number of countries covered by donors; and
b. Moving from project to budget support.
ii. The benefits of reduced untying.
iii. Reducing the volatility and unpredictability of aid.
iv. The impact of (i) – (iii) on growth.
v. The benefit of reallocating aid so as to maximise the impact of EU aid on poverty reduction.
4. Romilly Greenhill and Annalisa Prizzon then gave a presentation (Appendix 3), summarising their recent commentary on the report, also incorporating comments on the practical implications by Simon Maxwell.
5. Annalisa explored the main findings of the analysis:
a. Estimates on the direct benefits of implementing the PD (€3.2 billion) are broadly robust, although with some caveats.
b. Estimates on the indirect benefits (€1.8 billion) should be treated with caution, owing to some weaknesses in the model used.
c. Large hypothetical gains from aid reallocation to maximise poverty reduction (€7.8 billion) provide a broad ‘rule of thumb’ on the magnitude
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of potential benefits, although with some caveats.
d. The study only covers a narrow sub-set of the PD and AAA commitments. As a result, the direct benefits are probably significantly under-estimated.
6. Romilly then discussed what the figures tell us, noting that:
a. The figures are notional and should not be quoted in a policy-related context.
b. The ‘Paris agenda’ could bring substantial benefits.
c. The biggest gains by far are from country reallocation.
d. Even 25% success in improving country allocation would liberate €2 billion.
e. However, need to situate EU within broader context of other DAC and non-DAC actors, e.g. to avoid creating ‘donor orphans’.
7. Matt Geddes gave a presentation (Appendix 4) exploring the findings of his recent report – ‘Where do European Institutions rank on donor quality?’ – looking at four central issues:
a. Why do we have indices of donor aid quality?
b. What is an index, and what does it say about the EU institutions?
c. What are the potential problems with using indices?
d. Three suggestions to improve the evidence indices provide.
8. Matt emphasized the value of attempting to measure donor performance, not least to help in allocating resources. The EU performed at average or better in the indices reviewed. However, he cautioned against reading too much into these findings, demonstrating that the indices were conceptually incomplete and often contradictory. In particular, Matt emphasised the following weaknesses of using the indices as proxies for high quality aid:
a. Many aspects of aid quality are not easily measured
b. Little account is taken of external factors
c. Lessons about failure are often reversed to suggest that the complete opposite outcome is always better
d. There has been little testing of whether the ‘best practices’ form a cohesive blueprint
e. They do not take into account changes in optimal aid quality behaviour in relation to the behaviour of other donors.
9. Finally, Vincent Grimaud explored the political feasibility of the six key issues raised in the Bigsten et. al. study:
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a. Untying: The prospects of full untying are slim.
b. Predictability/volatility: More optimistic, especially considering the potentially significant gains of the short- and medium-terms.
c. Budget support: The Council Conclusions have now provided the political ground to continue using budget support as a major tool.
d. Concentration: The area where most gains could be made
e. Fragmentation: In terms of cross-country division of labour, there has been little progress as, to date, no donor has coordinated its choice of countries. Very pessimistic regarding future prospects but thinks progress can be made on in-country division of labour and particular joint-sectoral programming.
f. Country allocation: Potentially more scope given current debates
10. During the discussion that ensued many interesting ideas were raised, including:
· Differentiation: The European Commission’s new policy of differentiation could lead to savings of around €3bn from 2014-2020. As yet it is unclear to where these funds will be reallocated. However, differentiation is not only about which countries are 'in' and which are 'out', but also what types of modalities should be use. 'Soft' aid should be used in the EU's neighbourhood (including blending).
· MICs: Cutting aid to MICs is currently implemented on the basis of a retrospective analysis of poverty reduction, rather than prospects in the future. Future growth may well be less poverty alleviating than growth in the past. In any case, the current country aid allocation system is close to random and thus it would be very easy to make some substantial improvements to it.
· Sector specialisation. Stronger analysis on the impact of foreign aid by sector is necessary. This can be quite complicated, but it is very likely that $1 spent on productive sectors (e.g., agricultural innovation) will have a much stronger impact on poverty and sustainable development than $1 spent on traditional focus areas. These (within-country) reallocation gains could be much larger than potential efficiency gains and between-country reallocation gains. In-country sectoral reallocation can be a catalyst for structural transformation.
· Fiscal impact: It is important to evaluate the fiscal impact of aid which is greater in some countries than in others.
· Donor versus country focus: It would be useful to refocus this debate from the current donor-focused analysis to an analysis of the gains of aid effectiveness at the country level.
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Division of Labour (DoL): Current European Commission proposals for DoL are unpopular with some Member States as some prefer that DoL be a country-led and organised initiative rather than by the European Commission.
· Budget support: We need to do more on the transformational impacts of budget support. We also need to tell the story better. Qualitative research emerging from recent focus groups by ODI and IPPR reveal that public opinion around budget support is more positive than previously thought. People seem to be more worried about waste than corruption. Generally, there has been a good response to stories of change.
11. The panel left participants with the following thoughts:
Arne: Less is not always better. A certain amount of supervision/conditionality is needed. Funds are also needed to deal with volatility and shocks. The aid debate today is driven by the concern for corruption and transparency which has led to the programme vs. project conundrum. But, there is no less corruption on the project level than on the programme level.
Romilly: Building on the Bigsten et. al. study, it would be interesting to carry out a situation study at country level from recipients perspectives.
Vincent: The three big issues on the EU's agenda where it can make headway, are: budget support; transparency; and differentiation.
12. Closing the meeting, Simon Maxwell thanked the contributors, noting the benefits of bringing research analysis to the policy arena. There was clearly unfulfilled need for further work on the measurement of aid effectiveness. He asked all participants to make specific suggestions for future analysis and collaboration, in the hope that the EC and DFID could be persuaded to maintain support.
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SM/MG/SH
June 2012
Private Roundtable on Aid Effectiveness 14 June 2012
Agenda
12:00 – 12:15 Lunch
12:15 – 12:20 Simon Maxwell, Senior Research Associate, ODI
Introductory remarks
12:20 – 12:35 Arne Bigsten, Professor of Development Economics, University of Gothenburg
Report on ‘The Aid Effectiveness Agenda: The benefits of going ahead’
12:35 – 12:45 Romilly Greenhill, Research Fellow, ODI & Annalisa Prizzon, Research Officer, ODI
Comments on the report and practical implications for the aid effectiveness agenda
12:45 – 12:55 Matthew Geddes, Research Officer, ODI The EU in donor indices/rankings
12:55 – 13:10 Vincent Grimaud, Head of Aid and Development Effectiveness and Financing, DG DEVCO, European Commission
Practical implications of the findings for EU and Member State aid.
13:10 - 14:00 Discussion
Participants
Alan Harding Economics Adviser, EU Results & Delivery Team and Kosovo, Europe Department
DFID [email protected]
Alasdair Wardhaugh Head, Improving Aid Impact, Finance Performance and Impact Department
DFID [email protected]
Andrew Norton Director of Research ODI [email protected]
Anja Langenbucher Senior Policy Officer Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation
Annalisaa Prizzon Research Officer ODI [email protected]
Arne Bigsten Professor of Development Economics
University of Gothenburg
Claire Godfrey Development Finance and Public Services Team
Oxfam GB [email protected]
David Harrison Committee Clerk, International Development
House of Commons
APPENDIX 1
Committee
Edward Hedger Head, Centre for Aid and Public Expenditure
Eloise Todd Brussels Director ONE [email protected]
Gideon Rabinowitz Coordinator UKAN [email protected]
James Birch Interim UK Lead Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation
Jeroen
Kwakkenbos
Policy and Advocacy Officer
Eurodad [email protected]
Jessica Espey Senior Research and Policy Adviser
Save the Children UK
Louise Whitley Inquiry Manager/Adviser, International Development Committee
House of Commons
Matthew Geddes Research Officer ODI [email protected]
Marcus Cox Director Agulhas [email protected]
Mikaela Gavas Research Associate ODI [email protected]
Nicola Mclvor Coordinator UKAN [email protected]
Nuria Molina Director of Policy and Research
Save the Children UK
Pedro Martins Research Fellow ODI [email protected]
Ranil Dissanayake Strategy Unit DFID [email protected]
Romilly Greenhill Research Fellow ODI [email protected]
Richard Manning Independent Consultant
Rita Perakis Programme Associate Centre for Global
Development
Sarah Mulley Associate Director for Migration, Trade and Development
Institute for Public Policy and Research
Sian Herbert Research Officer/Programme Officer
Simon Maxwell Senior Research Associate
Stephen Lister Principal Consultant Mokoro
Tim Strawson Analyst Development Initiatives
Vincent Grimaud Head of Aid and Development Effectiveness and Financing, DG DEVCO
European Commission
The Aid Effectiveness Agenda: The benefits of going ahead
Arne Bigsten Gani Aldashev
Jean-Philippe Platteau Sven Tengstam
Presentation at ODI
June 2012
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APPENDIX 2
Introduction • The Paris Declaration (PD) makes a commitment
to eliminate duplication of efforts and rationalise donor activities to make them cost-effective
• By increasing partner country ownership, achieving a better donor harmonisation and alignment with the partner country's development strategy, managing for results, mutual accountability
• The purpose of this study is to produce estimates of the gains that can be made in terms of aid effectiveness by the full implementation of the commitments of the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA) and the Paris Declaration (PD) by the EU and its member states
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Structure of the empirical analysis
• Stage 1 - Estimates of the “first round” cost savings: (a) Changes in transaction costs due to improved donor coordination, (b) untying of aid, (c) aid predictability Chs. 7-9
• Stage 2 – Econometric analysis of the effect on growth of the introduction of PA variables Ch. 10
• Stage 3 - Aid policy effectiveness. Coordination of EU policy making with regard to the country allocation of EU aid (to maximize poverty reduction) Ch. 11
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• Cost savings - economics of scale.
• Cost savings on aid transaction costs is a key part of the Paris agenda.
• The focus in this section is on the short-term or transaction costs of aid on the donor side.
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Fragmentation and transaction costs on the donor side (Ch. 7)
Our approach
• To get a full coverage of all transaction costs of the donors we start from comprehensive information from the donors on all their administrative costs and evaluate how much of this cost donors could save by concentrating activities.
• We assume that the total aid budget will not shrink, which means that the remaining activities will be larger.
• Some increase in administrative overheads when country budgets get larger, but there are economies of scale so the increase is not proportional to the growth of the budget.
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• Step 1: We first scale down the administrative cost by reducing the number of partner countries, while keeping the overall aid budget constant and not changing the composition of the aid flow. Estimate economies of scale in aid delivery with the help of regression analysis.
• Step 2: We then reduce costs further by changing the aid modality. We investigate how much money that can be saved by shifting money from projects to programmes. We estimate the required amount of aid that goes from bilaterals as project support that needs to be shifted to programme support to meet the target of the Paris declaration (66%).
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• Step 1
• Regression (OLS – all countries) to derive an estimate of how administrative costs change when the number of recipients change.
• If a donor would lower the number of recipient by 37 partners (one standard deviation in the whole group), the effect is that the administrative costs decreases by about 20 %.
• Applying this 20% estimate on total EU administrative costs of $3215 million , we get a saving of 0.2 * 3215 = 643 Million USD. This is equivalent to €461 Million in 2009 prices.
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• Step 2 • Changing the modalities of aid. Price tags for the
administration of different modalities from Sida. • Programme aid on average only costs 33.5% of project
aid in donor administration costs. • After reducing the number of recipients in Step 1 we
now want to see how much of this that is affected by a shift from non-PBA (projects) to PBA. We first compute how much of these costs that are related to CPA, since this is where most of the costs savings will occur. We find that 73 % of the administrative costs, that is $1885 million, are related to CPA.
• Then we let 66 % of CPA go through PBA. • If we increase the proportion of CPA that is PBA from
the actual level for 2009 of 44% to 66%, the administrative costs related to CPA will be lowered by 21 %. That is a cost saving of €283 Million.
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Summing up on transaction costs
• As much as 29 % of CPA is technical assistance, and this is not included in our computation. Two reasons:
• First, we are able to reach the 66 % target by only shifting from projects to programmes. And there is a bigger saving from shifting from project to programmes than shifting from TA to programmes.
• Secondly, it is less clear that it is as feasible to shift this type of aid into programmes.
• Totals cost savings from lowered transaction costs according to our estimates would be €744 Million.
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Cost of the tying of aid (Ch. 8)
• To compute this we need two parameters:
• 1. The amount of EU aid that is tied.
• 2. The cost increase associated with tying.
• EC (2009) for 2007 and found that 10% of EU aid was tied and that the best estimate available for the increased cost was 15-30%. Their estimate for the cost of aid tying within EU was €400-800 million per year.
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• 1. Non-technical assistance. Looking at bilateral ODA (excl. TA and Admin costs) we get an estimate of 2864 USDm. We multiply this with our estimate of the share of the flow that is lost through tying of 18.4 %, which gives us a total cost of $527 million or €378 Million.
• 2. Technical assistance. The amount here is $3076 million and multiplying this by 18.4 % again we get $566 million or €406 Million.
• Total cost of tying EU aid is €784 Million.
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The benefits of reducing the un-predictability and volatility of EU aid (Ch. 9)
Basic definitions
• Unpredictability: actual aid disbursements from a donor to a partner country falls short of (or exceeds) the pledged amounts
• Volatility: aid disbursements from a donor to a partner country vary from one year to another
• We (have to) use volatility
Main methodology
• Kharas (2008) on the basis of finance theory: – A partner country holds a ‘portfolio’ of aid, similar to the
portfolio of risky assets held by an investor – Higher volatility is undesirable; the partner country would
be willing to receive lower expected flows of aid in exchange for lower volatility of its aid portfolio
– We can calculate the certainty equivalent of aid flows to any partner country: • The lowest amount of aid that the country would agree on
receiving if this aid were given to the partner country with certainty
– The difference between the aid flows to the partner country and the certainty equivalent is the deadweight loss: • The amount of financial loss to donor countries that could have
been avoided if the aid flows to the partner country were certain.
Our findings
• Tables 9.1 – 9.5 construct the measures of CPA volatility, for each partner country and from each donor
• Taking all the partner countries together, and using the 2009 figures, this sums up to the following: – The annual benefit from eliminating the volatility of
CPA flows from all EU Member States plus that from the EU Institutions would be equal to $2 342 million. This is equivalent to € 1681 million.
Effects of Paris agenda measures on the growth of recipients (Ch. 10)
Estimation strategy 1
• Cross-country growth regressions
• Problems
– Reversed causality
– Delayed effects
• “Solution”
– Lagged explanatory variables
Estimation strategy 2
• Growth=f(PA measures, standard variables) • PA measures:
– Proliferation (1/no of donors x aid/GDP) – General budget support/GDP (due to lack of data on
Programme based approaches) – Tied aid/GDP
• Standard variables – Initial: education level, investment level, GDP per
capita, population – Aid and aid squared, time dummies
• The estimated coefficients are used to predict.
Estimated impact of more General budget support
• Assume the EU27+COM increase its GBS-share (GBS/aid) by 11 percentage points (1 s.d.)
• Then the GBS-share for recipient countries would be increased by 4 percentage points.
Calculations
• Using the point estimate from our regression we get:
• This can be re-written as
• Summing gives €1808 million per year
Effects of EU coordination of country allocation of aid (Ch. 11)
• Trade-off for between aid efficiency and politics
• Larger countries are probably more willing to sacrifice efficiency for political control.
Gains from coordinating the country allocation of EU aid
• A thought experiment: EU27 + COM reallocate its aid to maximize poverty reduction.
• CPA (excl. regional aid) from EU27+COM was $27 300 million in 2009.
• We take into account:
– Decreasing returns with regard to its share of GDP.
– The aid saturation point is empirically found to be when aid/GDP (PPP) = 10 %.
The result
• $19 304 million of EU aid should be reallocated.
• An efficiency gain in terms of poverty reduction.
• The poverty reduction effect of a dollar in the darling countries is only 15.2 % of the effect the same dollar would have in the orphan countries.
• Net benefit is $19 304 million – $2934 million = $16 370 million.
But darlings have better institutions
• $11303 million of the surplus are in “bad darlings”. This money could be reallocated to the “good orphans”, who on average have the same institutions index. Bad darlings are poorer that other darlings, so mean efficiency loss will be 31%, not 15.2 %.
• For the remaining $8001 million: we assume it to be twice as high, that is 62 %.
• The net benefit then is $19 304 million – $8464 million = $10 840 million. This is equivalent to €7779 million.
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In search of an optimal aid system for the EU
• Some implications of our analysis.
• 1. What aid policies should be changed and coordinated?
• Relative importance of different policy changes
• Political feasibility of the proposed changes
• 2. How should the changes be organized?
• What role should the Commission play in the aid activities of the EU.
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Implied policy changes
• Harmonisation: • 1. Fewer countries – general forms of aid • Political problem - major countries would have to
abandon certain countries, while they may feel that they have a political interest in showing presence there.
• Compensated by channelling the money though a joint channel?
• 2. More general forms of aid - may be politically easier, but donors are reluctant to go for general forms of aid when they are uncertain about the quality of governance.
• But not self-evident that the quality of governance is less important for project support. 27
• Coordination of the country allocation of aid:
• Can it be based on poverty effect only?
• Reallocation could have high “political costs”.
• The beneficiaries are not found in countries which are major economic partners of the EU, nor have a strong strategic value.
• We do not expect that all the EU countries would be willing to make the full adjustment, but it is anyway appropriate to point out what the costs are in terms of poverty reduction foregone by sticking to the current allocation.
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• Ownership and Alignment: • Found a positive effect on growth from shifting to
more general forms of aid. • As long as the recent government pursues a
credible policy, donors should continue to seek to align aid to recipient policy.
• However, when policies are not acceptable donors need to adjust aid strategy. They can cease giving aid to the country in question, use non-government channels for aid, or try to change government behaviour with conditions.
• But when seeking to channel resources through a government it makes sense to see to it that it is integrated with the regular system.
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• Untying of aid:
• This is unproblematic and it is hard to find any strong arguments against it.
• This recommendation is the least problematic
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• Predictability of aid: • Our estimate of the gains is conservative.
• The challenge - what is required for donors to be able and willing to guarantee stable aid flows. Constraints implied by domestic budget procedures
• And there may be revelations of bad governance or corruption in the partner countries. The donors would then like to adjust its aid stance, which may be harder if there is a long-term agreement.
• So there are gains to be had if aid is more predictable, but to make aid contracts longer they may need some conditions specifying what should be done in case there are instances of inappropriate behaviour.
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• Improving mutual accountability, transparency and learning:
• Transparency is clearly a necessary ingredient in the governance set-up if the donors are to be willing to provide more general forms of aid, that is accept a higher degree of ownership.
• If there is more transparency and accountability, the donors would accept more general forms of aid.
• Increased recipient control of the policy process will lead to more learning.
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‘The Aid Effectiveness Agenda: The benefits of going ahead’
A commentary on the final report
Annalisa Prizzon and Romilly Greenhill Overseas Development Institute
14th June 2012
APPENDIX 3
Main comments • Estimates on the direct benefits of implementing the PD
(€ 3.2 billion) are broadly robust, although with some caveats.
• Estimates on the indirect benefits (€ 1.8 billion) should be treated with caution, due to some weaknesses in the model used.
• Large hypothetical gains from aid reallocation to maximise poverty reduction (€ 7.8 billion) provide a broad ‘rule of thumb’ on the magnitude of potential benefits, although with some caveats.
• The study only covers a narrow sub-set of the PD and AAA commitments. As a result, the direct benefits are probably significantly under-estimated.
Text in italics: primary responsibility is from partner countries: reasonable to exclude from this analysis Text in bold: Covered (fully or partially) in the analysis Other text: not covered.
No. Target Covered in the study
1 Partners have operational development strategies
2 Reliable country systems
3 Aid flows are aligned on national priorities
4 Strengthen capacity by co-ordinated support
5a 5b
Use of country PFM systems Use of country procurement systems
6 Strengthen capacity by avoiding Parallel Project Implementation Structures (PIUs)
7 Aid is more predictable
8 Aid is untied
9 Use of common arrangements or procedures (Programme Based Approaches)
10 Encourage shared analysis
11 Results oriented frameworks
12 Mutual accountability
What is missing from the Aid Effectiveness Agenda?
Recapitulation of key findings
What do these figures tell us?
• Figures are notional: shouldn’t be quoted in a policy-related context
• Suggests standard ‘Paris agenda’ could bring substantial benefits: important message
• Biggest gains by far are country allocation
– Maxwell: even 25% success in country allocation would liberate 2bn euro, a very large sum
• However, need to situate EU within broader context: other DAC and non-DAC actors
What next?
• Strengthen the methodology – Control for governance in analysis of impacts of budget support on
growth
– Better distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ volatility
– Include other areas of the Paris agenda
– Further sensitivity tests
• Apply a ‘political feasibility’ filter to findings to identify reform priorities – Untying: how likely given entrance of non-DAC donors?
– Predictability/volatility: important but challenging
– Budget support: potentially big gains but against the prevailing wind
– Country allocation: potentially more scope given current debates
Thank you
EU Institutions and indices of
donor aid quality
Matt Geddes
14 June 2012
APPENDIX 4
Contents
1. Why do we have indices of donor aid quality?
2. What is an index, and what do they say about the EU institutions?
3. What are the potential problems?
4. Three suggestions for improve the evidence indices provide
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Importance of aid quality
• Aid effectiveness is important, therefore measuring the quality of aid is important
• Indices of aid quality provide valuable evidence and are becoming more popular
• We need to understand how best to use that evidence
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The indices
The four indices: • Easterly, W., Williamson, C. (2011) Rhetoric vs. Reality: The Best and Worst of Aid Agency Practices
• Knack, S., Rogers, H., Eubank, N. (2011) Aid Quality and Donor Rankings
• Birdsall, N., Kharas, H., Mahgoub, A., Perakis, R. (2010) Quality of Official Development Assistance Assessment
• DFID (2011) Multilateral Aid Review
What is an index?
• The indices are scoring systems which compare a donors’ aid against the author’s vision of what effective/high-quality aid looks like. Vision = a collection of indicators (proxies).
What do they say about the EU institutions?
• The indices find that the EU Institutions have a range of strengths and weaknesses in comparison to other donors
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EU Institutions results
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They often agree, but……they also disagree, how come?
How can the results be different?
Reasons behind differing results:
1. They use different data
2. They use different indicators to measure the same concept
3. They are measuring different concepts
It is unclear which set of indicators/concept is right
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Poor proxies (for high quality aid)
They are based on “….plausible but largely untested beliefs about best practices in aid management” (Knack et al., 2011)
1. Many aspects of aid quality are not easily measured
2. Little account is taken of external factors
3. Lessons about failure are often reversed to suggest that the complete opposite outcome is always better
4. There has been little testing of whether the ‘best practices’ form a cohesive blueprint
5. They don’t take into account changes in optimal aid quality behaviour in relation to the behaviour of other donors.
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Being careful with index results
It is difficult to say whether the rankings in the indices are actually a good indicator of the impact the EU Institutions have on the ground.
The appropriate policy response is unclear
Policy issues
• Aid allocation and differentiation
• Administrative costs
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Administrative costs
• The indices find the EU Institutions have moderate to low administrative costs.
• But the EC Budget is often challenged on its administrative costs
Issues:
• Data problems – not measuring the same thing
• Poor proxy causes weak link to impact – we have little evidence that lower admin costs are better
• Un-assessed trade-off’s with other EC comparative advantages
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Ways to improve indices
• Get closer to aid impact
– To be able to make decisions between indicators/indices and identify trade-off’s
• How
– Recipient perspectives for weighting
– Support with case studies and other forms of evidence
– Disaggregate country and intervention (make context specific)
– Take account of volume
10
Final thoughts
• Aid quality is important
• The indices provide valuable evidence
• This evidence needs careful interpretation especially when used for policy questions
• Extending indices or supplementing them with other sources may mitigate some of these issues
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Thanks for listening / further details
Links:
• My paper on donor quality indices and the EU Institutions: http://www.odi.org.uk/resources/details.asp?id=6617
• A more theoretical paper which takes a deeper look at the workings of the indices and suggests/demonstrates several potential improvements: http://www.odi.org.uk/resources/details.asp?id=6613
Contact:
• [email protected] (my email address for the next three weeks)
• [email protected] (for contacting the EDCSP project about the paper)
• [email protected] (my personal address – to contact me after the 3rd July 2012)
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