World Bank working paper: Aid Quality and Donor Rankings
Released on May 4th, ‘Aid Quality and Donor Rankings’ is a paper by Knack, Rogers and Eubank from the World Bank. Part of the Policy Research working paper collection, it offers new measures of aid ranking covering 38 bilateral and multilateral donors as well as an analysis of the usefulness of these 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. This is a useful current reference for the aid transparency movement.