Years ago when I was building parts of the Commitment to Development Index, I decided to tweak the official computation of countries’ foreign aid spending. It didn’t make sense to me that Net Official Development Assistance (ODA) was “net” of principal repayments received on old aid loans, but not of interest paid on those same loans. As if $1 million flowing from Ghana to Japan had different consequences when it was interest instead of principal… Meanwhile, ODA totals would spike when donors officially recognized losses on aid loans that hadn’t really been serviced in years. Yet writing off loans gone bad didn’t in itself increase transfers from rich to poor nations.
Addressing the first of these concerns was easy. The Development Assistance Committee reports interest received even if it doesn’t subtract it from Net ODA. Addressing the second concern proved surprisingly hard using the information that DAC made available. So I documented both tweaks in a CGD working paper, created a variable called Net Aid Transfers (NAT), and shared the data set publicly.
Last month, the DAC released its full data set for 2013. In turn, I have just updated the NAT data to 2013 here.
This graph shows total aid from members of the Development Assistance Committee computed the two ways for 1960-2013, in inflation-adjusted dollars of 2012:
