Does Foreign Aid Really Work?

by Riddell, Roger C.

• ISBN13: 9780199544462
• ISBN10: 0199544468
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2008-08-15
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Foreign aid is now a $100bn business and is expanding more rapidly today than it has for a generation. But does it work? Indeed, is it needed at all? Other attempts to answer these important questions have been dominated by a focus on the impact of official aid provided by governments. But today possibly as much as 30 percent of aid is provided by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and over 10 percent is provided as emergency assistance. In this first-ever attempt to provide an overall assessment of aid, Roger Riddell presents a rigorous but highly readable account of aid, warts and all. oes Foreign Aid Really Work? sets out the evidence and exposes the instances where aid has failed and explains why. The book also examines the way that politics distorts aid, and disentangles the moral and ethical assumptions that lie behind the belief that aid does good. The book concludes by detailing the practical ways that aid needs to change if it is to be the effective force for good that its providers claim it is.

Author Biography

Roger Riddell is a Non-Executive Director of Oxford Policy Management and a Principle of The Policy Practice. He was Chair of the first Presidential Economic Commission of Independent Zimbabwe in 1980, and Chief Economist of the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries from 1981-83. From 1984 to 1998, he was a senior Research Fellow at the Overseas Development Institute, London and for five years to 2004 was International Director of Christian Aid.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. xi
List of Tables	p. xii
List of Boxes	p. xiii
Preface	p. xv
Preface for the Paperback Edition	p. xxi
List of Abbreviations	p. xxiii
'A good thing?'	p. 1
The aid revival	p. 2
A different book on aid	p. 4
Outline of the book	p. 9
The Complex Worlds of Foreign Aid	p. 15
The origins and early decades of aid-giving	p. 17
Defining aid	p. 17
A snapshot of the history of aid	p. 21
The origins of aid: the pre-1949 era	p. 24
The 1950s to the 1960s	p. 26
Aid-giving from the 1970s to the present	p. 31
The 1970s and 1980s	p. 31
From the 1990s to today	p. 38
The growing web of bilateral aid donors	p. 51
The ever-increasing number of donors	p. 51
The explosion in the numbers of non-governmental organizations	p. 53
The main bilateral donors	p. 55
The smaller bilateral donors	p. 69
The complexities of multilateral aid	p. 77
What is multilateral aid and how much of it is there?	p. 77
The international financial institutions	p. 81
The United Nations, development and aid	p. 82
Other multilateral agencies	p. 85
Systemic issues	p. 86
Why is Aid Given?	p. 89
The political and commercial dimensions of aid	p. 91
Why governments give aid	p. 91
Politics and national self-interest in aid-giving	p. 94
Commercial interests in aid-giving	p. 98
The overall impact of political and commercial influences on aid	p. 101
Concluding comments	p. 105
Public support for aid	p. 107
Trends in public support	p. 107
The reliability of public opinion surveys	p. 113
Public support for aid and public perception of its effectiveness	p. 114
Charity or duty? The moral case for aid	p. 119
Facts on the ground	p. 120
Ethical theories and approaches	p. 129
The moral case for governments, NGOs and individuals to provide aid	p. 139
Donor governments: current and evolving views	p. 139
Aid and the nature of governments' moral obligations	p. 142
Ethics, voluntary aid-giving and the world of NGOs	p. 154
Does Aid Really Work?	p. 163
Assessing and measuring the impact of aid	p. 165
Methodological challenges and data-gaps	p. 166
Judging the impact and performance of aid: what questions need to be asked?	p. 170
Understanding how aid contributes to growth and development	p. 173
Expectations about the impact of aid	p. 175
The impact of official development aid projects	p. 179
Project aid: an overview	p. 180
Detailed project performance	p. 183
Data quality and the sustainability of official aid projects	p. 186
The wider picture	p. 187
Summing up	p. 192
The impact of programme aid, technical assistance and aid for capacity development	p. 195
Programme aid	p. 195
Technical assistance	p. 202
Aid for capacity building	p. 207
The impact of aid at the country and cross-country level	p. 213
The country-level impact of aid	p. 213
The impact of official development aid across countries	p. 222
Assessing the impact of aid conditionality	p. 231
Aggregate aid impact and the policy environment	p. 231
Official donor conditionality and recipient response	p. 235
Does policy conditionality produce the results intended?	p. 241
Summing up	p. 251
Does official development aid really work? A summing up	p. 253
The search for sustainability	p. 253
Effectiveness does matter	p. 256
NGOs in development and the impact of discrete NGO development interventions	p. 259
NGOs: an overview	p. 259
Methodological challenges	p. 265
The impact of NGO development projects and programmes	p. 269
Cost-effectiveness, quality, innovation and replication	p. 276
Capacity development and institutional strengthening	p. 282
The wider impact of non-governmental and civil society organizations	p. 287
NGO advocacy, lobbying, awareness-raising and campaigning	p. 288
Strengthening NGOs and strengthening civil society	p. 301
The contribution of NGOs to development: a summing up	p. 306
The growth of emergencies and the humanitarian response	p. 311
Emergencies and disasters: an overview	p. 311
The humanitarian aid response	p. 315
The impact of emergency and humanitarian aid	p. 325
Assessing humanitarian aid	p. 325
The impact of humanitarian action and humanitarian aid	p. 336
Advocacy in humanitarian action	p. 349
Emergency and humanitarian aid: a summing up	p. 352
Towards a Different Future for Aid	p. 355
Why aid isn't working	p. 357
Systematic impediments to aid effectiveness: problems caused by donors	p. 358
Problems at the recipient end: aid dilemmas	p. 369
Conclusion	p. 379
Making aid work better by implementing agreed reforms	p. 381
The discrete individual-donor approach	p. 382
The step-change international cooperative approach	p. 383
Taking stock	p. 385
Making aid work better by recasting aid relationships	p. 389
Confronting the politics of aid-giving	p. 390
Recasting aid relationships	p. 391
Making aid work better: addressing five key problem areas	p. 398
Bridging the divide between ideas and implementation	p. 411
Notes	p. 415
References	p. 459
Index	p. 491
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