Tag: Redefining ODA

As they committed to do, the members of the Development Assistance Committee have struck a deal to revise how loans are counted as Official Development Assistance (ODA). They announced it today at the end of their two-day High-Level Meeting in Paris.

The specifics validate the rumors I passed on last month. The benchmark discount rate will be changed from the fixed 10% to the IMF’s new “unified” rate. Now, that rate is 5%. Based on a 10-year moving average of the U.S. 10-year treasury rate, it will plunge to 4% in a little over two years, I estimate, if its formula is followed faithfully. However, I believe that the IMF has not yet committed  to updating the rate so mechanically, perhaps because a lower rate would make borrowers’ current debt loads look less sustainable, leaving less room for new lending, to the discomfort of some donor governments. So the DAC has hitched itself to a benchmark whose future is a bit fuzzy.

To the IMF rate will be added a simple risk premium, so that loans will count more as aid when going to countries deemed more likely to default: a 1% premium for upper-middle-income countries (UMICs), 2% for lower-middle-income countries (LMICs), and 4% for low-income countries (LICs). As it happens, the IMF’s sibling, the World Bank, curates this three-way classification of developing countries, which is effectively annexed to the statistical definition of aid.
Continue reading “Political compromise is not mathematically beautiful”

After two years of communiqués, consultations, and commentary, the Development Assistance Committee has gotten down to brass tacks in fixing the definition of Official Development Assistance (ODA). I hear that a negotiating group composed of key donor representatives named for its chair, the UK’s Mark Lowcock, has reached a tentative deal. The Lowcock group’s role being unofficial, DAC chair Erik Solheim has turned its consensus into a proposal for discussion with the entire DAC membership.

I have not seen the document, so I cannot report definitively on it. It appears purely focussed on the issue that forced the discussions in the first place, which is when and how much to count loans as aid. I gather that the principle elements of the compromise are:

Continue reading “An aid loan is not just a throw of the dice”

I promise this is the last post on the incorporation of loans into the measurement of Official Development Assistance. Actually, it’s a cross-posting of something I just wrote for CGD. Leaving aside the question of whether to factor default risk into the determination of whether a loan is aid, I enunciate four principles for counting loans as aid.

Next week I’ll be in Paris, where I will participate in several meetings at the DAC on these very questions, and present my work to staff. I’m sure I’ll learn a lot about the substance and the process. I’ll report back to you after that.

Sorry for the silence here.

I worked on two main projects over the last month. For GiveWell and Good Ventures, I began reviewing what is known about the economic impacts of immigration in receiving countries, particularly on low-wage workers. Good Ventures is considering labor mobility as an area in which it could actively support policy advocacy. But they want due diligence on the concern that allowing more immigrants in will depress earnings for those already here. I’ll share more of that work when it’s ready.

And for my old employer, the Center for Global Development, I wrote a paper that expands on my earlier work on how foreign aid should be defined for purposes of statistics. CGD posted the paper last Thursday and a blog post about it this morning. Go read that. (More blogging for CGD will follow.)

Continue reading “The Crisis in Official Development Assistance (ODA) Statistics: Needed Revamp Would Lift Japan, Lower France”

In the close of my last post, I indicated that I had more to say about how best to count loans as aid. Now I’ll say it.

The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) currently handles loans this way:

• To count as Official Development Assistance (ODA), as explained in the last post, loans must meet two criteria:

  Continue reading “What’s the best way to count loans as aid?”

Last April, former Development Assistance Committee chair Richard Manning penned a scorching alarum in the Financial Times. Unbeknownst to the public, donors were inflating their aid totals by including loans that would profit the donors if paid in full. And the DAC, whose job it is to validate and publish these tallies, had proved feckless in defending the principle that for a loan to count as aid, it should profit the recipient not the donor.

The OECD must put in place a definition of concessionality that reflects the real cost of capital and requires real fiscal effort. It is shocking that the OECD should publish official statistics that allow “different practices” on such a key issue and which make a mockery of its own requirement that loans are concessional in character. It is encouraging OECD finance ministries to get away with murder as they seek to massage reported aid upwards at minimum cost. If the OECD cannot do a professional job on this, the UN should take over the reporting for international aid flows.

Continue reading “Undue credit: Are France, Germany, and Japan subverting the definition of aid?”