IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/wbk/wbrwps/5290.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Aid quality and donor rankings

Author

Listed:
  • Knack, Stephen
  • Rogers, F. Halsey
  • Eubank, Nicholas

Abstract

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Knack, Stephen & Rogers, F. Halsey & Eubank, Nicholas, 2010. "Aid quality and donor rankings," Policy Research Working Paper Series 5290, The World Bank.
    • Handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:5290
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2012/04/16/000158349_20120416105004/Rendered/PDF/WPS5290.pdf
    Download Restriction: no

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Martens,Bertin & Mummert,Uwe & Murrell,Peter & Seabright,Paul, 2008. "The Institutional Economics of Foreign Aid," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521055390, August.
    2. Jeremy Bulow & Kenneth Rogoff, 2005. "Grants versus Loans for Development Banks," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 95(2), pages 393-397, May.
    3. Knack, Stephen & Rahman, Aminur, 2007. "Donor fragmentation and bureaucratic quality in aid recipients," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 83(1), pages 176-197, May.
    4. Annen Kurt & Kosempel Stephen, 2009. "Foreign Aid, Donor Fragmentation, and Economic Growth," The B.E. Journal of Macroeconomics, De Gruyter, vol. 9(1), pages 1-32, August.
    5. Knack, Stephen & Eubank, Nicholas, 2009. "Aid and trust in country systems," Policy Research Working Paper Series 5005, The World Bank.
    6. David Dollar & Craig Burnside, 2000. "Aid, Policies, and Growth," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(4), pages 847-868, September.
    7. William Easterly & Ross Levine & David Roodman, 2003. "New Data, New doubts: A Comment on Burnside and Dollar's "Aid, Policies, and Growth" (2000)," NBER Working Papers 9846, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    8. Henrik Hansen & Finn Tarp, 2000. "Aid effectiveness disputed," Journal of International Development, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 12(3), pages 375-398, April.
    9. Dollar, David & Levin, Victoria, 2006. "The Increasing Selectivity of Foreign Aid, 1984-2003," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 34(12), pages 2034-2046, December.
    10. Kilby, Christopher, 2011. "What Determines the Size of Aid Projects?," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 39(11), pages 1981-1994.
    11. W. Edward Steinmueller, 2009. "Comments," Chapters,in: The New Economics of Technology Policy, chapter 14 Edward Elgar Publishing.
    12. Knack, Stephen & Rogers, F. Halsey & Eubank, Nicholas, 2011. "Aid Quality and Donor Rankings," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 39(11), pages 1907-1917.
    13. Arnab Acharya & Ana Teresa Fuzzo de Lima & Mick Moore, 2006. "Proliferation and fragmentation: Transactions costs and the value of aid," Journal of Development Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 42(1), pages 1-21.
    14. William Easterly, 2007. "Are aid agencies improving?," Economic Policy, CEPR;CES;MSH, vol. 22, pages 633-678, October.
    15. Mosley, Paul, 1985. "The Political Economy of Foreign Aid: A Model of the Market for a Public Good," Economic Development and Cultural Change, University of Chicago Press, vol. 33(2), pages 373-393, January.
    16. William Easterly & Ross Levine & David Roodman, 2004. "Aid, Policies, and Growth: Comment," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 94(3), pages 774-780, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Gender and Health; Development Economics&Aid Effectiveness; Economic Adjustment and Lending; Disability; Poverty Monitoring&Analysis;

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:wbk:wbrwps:5290. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Roula I. Yazigi). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/dvewbus.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.