European Aid Donors

Abstract

The real value of official development assistance (oda) from the industrialised countries has been pitifully low during the UN’s ‘Second Development Decade’. Oda disbursements net of amortisation but not interest from the 17 member countries of the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) increased in 1970 dollar prices to about $7.19 billion,¹ compared with the 1970 disbursement of $6.81 billion. As a share of donor GNP, however, disbursements from DAC member states have fallen from 0.42 per cent in the mid-1960s to 0.34 per cent in 1970 and 0.31 per cent in 1977. Since the beginning of the Second Development Decade, the overall contribution of these donors has never exceeded half of the 0.7 per cent target. This average figure, it is true, masks an exceptional effort by some European countries, three of whom have achieved the UN target. Also, some oil-producing nations have allocated far larger shares of their GNP to aid funds than any of the traditional donors, and in many of the DAC member countries non-official aid raised and channelled by private voluntary organisations has progressed remarkably. Nevertheless the overall picture is of highly concessional transfers for development purposes being barely maintained in terms of real value and becoming proportionately less significant than other forms of resource transfer. This paper concentrates on the overall volume of aid disbursed by European members of DAC over the last decade and analyses the content of the aid by comparing the various policies on terms, country allocation and procurement-tying.