Summary

Research Report: Provides a critical appraisal of the CDI aid component ie. the multi-component index that ranks the 21 member countries of the OECD's DAC in six policy areas: aid, trade, environment, investment, migration and peacekeeping.

Description

Author: Professor Mark McGillivray, World Institute for Development Economic Research,
Helsinki, Finland

The Center for Global Development released its Commitment to Development Index (CDI) in April 2003. The CDI is multi-component index that ranks the 21 member countries of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee in six policy areas: aid, trade, environment, investment, migration and peacekeeping.

This paper provides a critical appraisal of the CDI aid component. After providing details of country rankings and examining the media response to the index, the paper outlines the construction and calculation of the aid component of the CDI and highlights differences from other aid performance indicators. Special attention is given to donor actions that can improve aid component rankings. It also looks at some technical and conceptual issues, including correlations with pre-existing measures of aid, the weighting of components and what constitutes a good pattern of inter-country aid allocation.

Among the findings of the paper is that donor rankings, according to the CDI aid component, are not terribly sensitive to differences in aid quality, and that 99 percent of the component's variation is accounted for by the size of donor aid programs. The paper identifies a number of areas in which the aid component can be strengthened, and suggests ways to achieve this outcome. The basic premise of the paper is that the aid component of the CDI is a potentially very useful initiative, but one that benefit from further refinement and clearer articulation.

The paper also identifies a number of alternative aid performance measures, based on recent donor policy directions and on the findings of research on aid effectiveness. The measures include the proportions of aid allocated to post-conflict countries and to countries with good human rights records.

Commitment to Development Index: A Critical Appraisal [PDF 145KB]

Available: Electronic version only

This report was commissioned by AusAID. The findings, interpretations and conclusions expressed in the report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of AusAID or the Australian Government.

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