Official Development Assistance
Despite the declining importance of aid as a source of development-relevant finance globally, official development assistance (ODA) still plays a significant role in many LICs and fragile countries that have little capacity to attract FDI or access capital markets. However, the definition of what exactly constitutes ODA has always been a difficult political compromise with ample room for interpretation. Shrinking aid budgets and the emergence of a new development-finance landscape with additional goals, players and instruments have led to an intensification of the debate at the OECD-DAC on adapting/modernizing the ODA concept.
The Work Package is subdivided in two sub-packages:
- DA1 will provide a comprehensive overview of the composition of Belgian ODA and other development-relevant funding and to develop simulations of what different proposals that are currently on the table at the DAC would mean for Belgian aid reporting.
- Involved research institutes: CRED and IOB
- Involved researchers: Danny Cassimon, Paul Reding, Robrecht Renard and Karel Verbeke
- DA2 focuses on the proposed changes on the ODA definition and more particularly on the economic equivalence of grants, concessional loans, debt relief and contingent guarantees from the recipient’s perspective and the intra-donor implications of ODA accounting.
- Involved research institutes: CRED and IOB
- Involved researchers: Danny Cassimon, Paul Reding and Karel Verbeke
- DA 3 focuses on particular institutional and governance aspects of ODA, e.g. the allocation of aid among countries with different characteristics or the issue of aid coordination
- Involved research institutes: CRED
- Involved researchers: Jean-Philippe Platteau