Empirical evidence on the new international aid architecture

We conduct an empirical study on how 22 donors allocate their bilateral aid among 147 recipient countries over the 1970-2004 period to investigate whether recent changes in the international aid architecture at the international and country levelhave led to changes in donor behavior. We find that after the fall of the Berlin Wall and especially in the late nineties, bilateral aid responds more to economic needs and the quality of a country’s policy and institutional environment and less to debt, size and colonial and political linkages. We also find more selectivity by donors when a country uses a PRSP and passes the HIPC decision point. Importantly, PRSPs and HIPCs reduce the perverse effects of large bilateral and multilateral debt shares on aid flows, suggesting less defensive lending. Overall, it appears certain international aid architecture changes have led to more selectivity in aid allocations. The specific factors causing these changes remain unclear, however. And since there remain (large) differences among donors in selectivity that appear to relate to donors’ own institutional environments, reforms will have to be multifaceted.development aid, aid allocation, selectivity, debt relief, HIPC, PRSP, aid architecture

Networks and Networking in the Cameroon Highlands: An Occasional Paper on Capacity Builders' Experience

This report looks at the impacts of civil society networking trainings in Cameroon Highland

Changes and continuity in Japanese official development assistance : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Sociology at Massey University

This paper is about Japanese official development assistance (ODA), based on document research and monitoring of media reports in the period between January and October, 2005. It analyses changes in this aspect of Japanese foreign policy since its inception in the 1950's with this analysis then used to predict what further change may be likely to result in the programme in the immediate future. Building on a conflict model of the Japanese state that treats the bureaucracy as a divided but powerful power centre, the paper argues that recent developments in Japanese society have led to a situation where the political wing of government and civil society have come to play a larger part in both the implementation of ODA and, to a lesser extent, the creation of aid policy. It concludes that the individual ministries of the bureaucracy are unlikely to transfer power to these groups without any resistance and that this resistance will hinder efforts to provide more political leadership of, and wider societal input into, the Japanese ODA programme

Poverty reduction through democratisation? : PRSP: challenges of a new development assistance strategy

The unpretentious acronym, “PRSP”, embodies a concept of thorough reform in the policies of international development. With the adoption of the Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper Initiative in September 1999, the World Bank and the IMF declared the notions of national ownership and social participation to be the fundamental principles for both their loan policies and the extension of debt relief to highly indebted poor countries (HIPC II). Since then, the recipient countries have to set up their own development plans, i.e. PRSPs. And “civil society” and in particular “the poor” themselves have to assist in the setting up, operation and control of such programmes. In principle, with the PRSP approach democratisation has finally been integrated in IMF and World Bank strategy. The following report considers the extent of this conceptual change. As a concept, PRSP embraces far-reaching changes and opens up far-reaching chances. However, in the reality of PRSP processes ownership collides with the still dominant role of IMF and World Bank, participation appears as mere consultation steered by respective governments, while the macro-economic framework largely remains excluded from public debate . A review of the debate on experiences with PRSP as well as two case studies on Bolivia and Tanzania demonstrate that these inconsistencies, contradictions and limitations are as far reaching as to query the concept itself

Multi-Node Advanced Performance and Power Analysis with Paraver

Performance analysis tools allow application developers to identify and characterize the inefficiencies that cause performance degradation in their codes. Due to the increasing interest in the High Performance Computing (HPC) community towards energy-efficiency issues, it is of paramount importance to be able to correlate performance and power figures within the same profiling and analysis tools. For this reason, we present a preliminary performance and energy-efficiency study aimed at demonstrating how a single tool can be used to collect most of the relevant metrics. Moreover we show how the same analysis techniques are applicable on different architectures, analyzing the same HPC application running on two clusters, based respectively on Intel Haswell and Arm Cortex-A57 CPUs.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme [FP7/2007-2013] and Horizon 2020 under the Mont-Blanc projects, grant agreements n. 288777, 610402 and 671697. E.C. was partially founded by “Contributo 5 per mille assegnato all’Universit`a degli Studi di Ferrara - dichiarazione dei redditi dell’anno 2014”.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft