The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set an ambitious target to halve the number of people living in absolute poverty by 2015. That target may be met, but many other MDGs will likely be missed, leaving the world with a development challenge beyond what it had once hoped to face. OECD Insights: Development and Aid examines the scale of that challenge and the role of development aid in helping to meet it.
Brian Keeley and his contributors show that while development aid can help combat poverty and build foundations for economic growth, it is no magic bullet. Aid is just one small part of the financial flows to developing economies. The contexts of aid —donors' intentions and recipients' quality of governance, for example —help determine whether or not it works. The book also looks at the evolution of the aid relationship, from donor-recipient to development partners, as well as the aid-effectiveness debate and the potential impact of cooperation between countries of the global South on the development agenda.
1 Introduction 8
Partners for development 11
Contexts: The persistence of old ideas 13
What this book is about 20
2 The persistence of poverty 22
Why are some countries still poor? 25
What is the development challenge? 33
Special section: The Millennium Development Goals 35
3 What is aid? 46
Is all aid the same? 49
Who provides aid? 54
Special section: Aid - some numbers 60
4 Shifting development goals and motivations 66
Development co-operation: A brief history 69
What motivates aid-giving? 77
What are aid's objectives? 80
5 Are we getting results? 84
What are the critiques of aid? 87
Does aid promote growth? 89
What does the public think? 94
How is success or failure measured? 97
6 Changing relationships and policies 102
How can aid be made more effective? 105
What is the impact of corruption on development? 113
What is policy coherence? 117
7 Governance matters 124
What is the role of governance? 127
What are fragile states? 134
How can taxation help development? 137
8 New partners for development 146
How is the world shifting? 149
What is South-South co-operation? 154
By way of conclusion 162
References 166
Overview
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set an ambitious target to halve the number of people living in absolute poverty by 2015. That target may be met, but many other MDGs will likely be missed, leaving the world with a development challenge beyond what it had once hoped to face. OECD Insights: Development and Aid examines the scale of that challenge and the role of development aid in helping to meet it.
Brian Keeley and his contributors show that while development aid can ...