Does foreign aid really work?

531 Pages·2007·3.46 MB·English

by  Roger Riddell

Does Foreign Aid Really Work?
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Does Foreign Aid
Really Work?
Roger C. Riddell
1
3
Great Clarendon Street,Oxford OX2 6DP
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© Roger C.Riddell,2007
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First published 2007
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ISBN 978–0–19–929565–4
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For Eliza,Becky and Zoe
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■ CONTENTS
LIST OF FIGURES xi
LIST OF TABLES xii
LIST OF BOXES xiii
PREFACE xv
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS xxi
1. ‘A good thing?’ 1
The aid revival 2
A different book on aid 4
Outline of the book 9
PART I: THE COMPLEX WORLDS OF FOREIGN AID 15
2. The origins and early decades of aid-giving 17
Defining aid 17
A snapshot of the history of aid 21
The origins of aid: the pre-1949 era 24
The 1950s to the 1960s 26
3. Aid-giving from the 1970s to the present 31
The 1970s and 1980s 31
From the 1990s to today 38
4. The growing web of bilateral aid donors 51
The ever-increasing number of donors 51
The explosion in the numbers of non-governmental organizations 53
The main bilateral donors 55
The smaller bilateral donors 69
5. The complexities of multilateral aid 77
What is multilateral aid and how much of it is there? 77
The international financial institutions 81
The United Nations, development and aid 82
Other multilateral agencies 85
Systemic issues 86
viii CONTENTS
PART II: WHY IS AID GIVEN? 89
6. The political and commercial dimensions of aid 91
Why governments give aid 91
Politics and national self-interest in aid-giving 94
Commercial interests in aid-giving 98
The overall impact of political and commercial influences on aid 101
Concluding comments 105
7. Public support for aid 107
Trends in public support 107
The reliability of public opinion surveys 113
Public support for aid and public perception of its effectiveness 114
8. Charity or duty? The moral case for aid 119
Facts on the ground 120
Ethical theories and approaches 129
9. The moral case for governments and individuals to provide aid 139
Donor governments: current and evolving views 139
Aid and the nature of governments’ moral obligations 142
Ethics, voluntary aid-giving and the world of NGOs 154
PART III: DOES AID REALLY WORK? 163
10. Assessing and measuring the impact of aid 165
Methodological challenges and data-gaps 166
Judging the impact and performance of aid: what questions
need to be asked? 170
Understanding how aid contributes to growth and development 173
Expectations about the impact of aid 175
11. The impact of official development aid projects 179
Project aid: an overview 180
Detailed project performance 183
Data quality and the sustainability of official aid projects 186
The wider picture 187
Summing up 192
CONTENTS ix
12. The impact of programme aid,technical assistance and aid for
capacity development 195
Programme aid 195
Technical assistance 202
Aid for capacity building 207
13. The impact of aid at the country and cross-country level 213
The country-level impact of aid 213
The impact of official development aid across countries 222
14. Assessing the impact of aid conditionality 231
Aggregate aid impact and the policy environment 231
Official donor conditionality and recipient response 235
Does policy conditionality produce the results intended? 241
Summing up 251
15. Does official development aid really work? A summing up 253
The search for sustainability 253
Effectiveness does matter 256
16. NGOs in development and the impact of discrete NGO
development interventions 259
NGOs: an overview 259
Methodological challenges 265
The impact of NGO development projects and programmes 269
Cost-effectiveness, quality, innovation and replication 276
Capacity development and institutional strengthening 282
17. The wider impact of non-governmental and civil
society organizations 287
NGO advocacy, lobbying, awareness-raising and campaigning 288
Strengthening NGOs and strengthening civil society 301
The contribution of NGOs to development: a summing up 306
18. The growth of emergencies and the humanitarian response 311
Emergencies and disasters: an overview 311
The humanitarian aid response 315