Aid Quality and Donor Rankings

By Stephen F. Knack, F. Rogers, N. Eubank, Rogers Knack, Eubank are. 2010

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Development, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c839f51d1471263383faf71b19842433db166bb4

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In Development

1. Andreas Fuchs
2. Axel Dreher
3. J. Vreeland
4. R. Stone
5. Diego F. Hernández
6. Michael J. Tierney
7. Christopher Kilby
8. Lindsay R. Dolan

In Safety Research

1. Andreas Fuchs
2. Axel Dreher
3. J. Vreeland
4. Michael J. Tierney
5. Andreas Kotsadam
6. A. Isaksson
7. Austin Strange
8. Bradley C. Parks

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Andreas Fuchs
2. Axel Dreher
3. Friedrich Schneider
4. Niklas Potrafke
5. Nuno Carlos Leitão

Citations in the corpus

• Rogue Aid? The Determinants of China's Aid Allocation (2011, background): “50 In the aid quality index of Knack et al. (2011), Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway score first, third, fourth and seventh, respectively, for all bilateral donors.”
• Investing in public investment: an index of public investment efficiency (2012, unknown): “In addition, the absence of strong priors over the weights of indicators in each of the sub-indices makes simple averaging the natural benchmark candidate in the literature (see for e.g., Knack et al., 2010).”
• Rhetoric versus reality: the best and worst of aid agency practices (2011, unknown): “The most ambitious and persuasive effort along these lines is Knack, Rogers, and Eubank (2010), which controls for factors like an agency’s geographic range when monitoring their behavior.”