Statistics on International Development Aid
You are here: Homepage > Human rights statistics > Statistics on poverty > Statistics on development aid
There’s a more descriptive post on development aid and human rights here.
Content:
1. Levels of development aid
2. Human Development Index
3. Foreign debt and debt relief
4. Aid and democracy
1. Levels of development aid
The total amount of international development aid is now more than $100 billion a year.
In 2008, rich countries gave $119.8 billion in foreign aid. This is over 10% more than in 2007 and is the highest amount ever given. This is an average of 0.47% of GDP to aid, up from 0.45% in 2007, though this is still considerably below the United Nations target of 0.7%.
(source)
The main beneficiaries of aid are, no surprise there, in Africa:
Some countries in Africa depend heavily on aid. The contribution of aid to their GDP is of such an extent that the countries would collapse were the aid to stop:
An often overlooked aspect of aid is worker remittances. This is money send back home by nationals working abroad, mostly to families and friends. As seen from the following graph, this kind of informal aid has become even more important than the formal, government sponsored or international development aid:
US development aid, expressed as a proportion of GDP, is relatively low compared to that of other countries (see this post). But donations from individuals, private organizations and businesses are very high, dwarfing those of other rich nations. This is the result of a culture of philanthropy and charity and of a generous tax regime:
(source)
^ back to top
2. Human Development Index
The following 2 graphs show the HDI in 2002 and 2007:
This graph shows the different levels of progress by continent:
^ back to top
3. Foreign debt and debt relief
^ back to top
4. Aid and democracy
Via Bill Easterly’s blog, I discovered this paper on the so-called “aid curse“: just as dependence on natural resources has a negative effect on the quality of a country’s governance and democracy (a phenomenon called the resource curse), so has international development aid (or official development aid, ODA), especially in countries which depend heavily on aid (and in which aid represents a large percentage of GDP).
This is surprising, because one of the aims of international development aid is to bolster the quality of governance, directly through aid targeted at this objective, or indirectly on the assumption that better education, health care etc. will ultimately lead to better governance.
It seems now that there is a correlation (and perhaps even a causal link) between high levels of aid and low levels of democracy. The explanation is that foreign aid , like the revenue of natural resources, provides an opportunity for governments and leaders to appropriate funds illegitimately. And, because they benefit from aid, they will try to exclude other groups from power. This obviously destroys democratic institutions or makes it more difficult to establish them.
Foreign aid also reduces the need for a system of taxation. And without such a system, it’s a lot more difficult to construct a well-functioning government, and it’s less likely that forces for representation take root (historically, the principle of “no taxation without representation” has promoted democracy). When a government doesn’t depend on taxes for its revenues, then it will have less incentives to seek accountability.
These graphs from the paper show how the levels of democracy in countries decrease while the levels of aid (as official development aid – ODA - over GDP) increase:
^ back to top
