Finance for International Development (FID): A New Measure to Compare Traditional and Emerging Provider Countries’ Official Development Finance Efforts, and Some Provisional Results

It is increasingly recognised that countries outside the OECD are important players in development. However, there is no consistent measurement of development effort across all major economies. In this working paper we present a new indicator—Finance for International Development (FID)—that attempts to fill this gap by measuring in a comparable way the flows of official, cross-border concessional finance provided by 40 major economies. These countries collectively account for 88 percent of global GNI, and in 2017 provided $150 billion of development assistance by our measure, 18 percent of which was from countries outside the OECD. We present estimates of FID for each country, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of GNI, and outline differences between FID and existing indicators. Finally, we outline some limitations and how we would like to develop FID in the future.