Official Development Assistance: pre-requisites for effectiveness and proposal for improvements

Abstract

This paper has been prepared as a contribution of the Italian Social and Economic Council to the recurrent debate about critical issues on official development assistance, with some specific reference to the Italian position in this area. After some introductory remarks in Section 1, in Section 2 the paper starts from the recent provocative essay by Dambisa Moyo “Dead Aid” and then examines several issues that hinge upon aid effectiveness, its measurement and complex causations. Thus no wonder that so many opposite conclusions have been drawn from various attempts to find econometric evidence about a positive causal relation between aid and aggregate growth. Section 3 covers a series of recommendations and proposals. Section 4 summarizes and concludes.