How does the CDI handle the invasion of Iraq?
1. Why are these 21 countries scored?
These 21 countries are
the richest, most developed countries in the world, leaving out tiny nations such as Iceland and Luxembourg. Along with Luxembourg, they constitute the
full membership of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Development Assistance Committee (OECD-DAC), which is the official organization of aid donors.
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2. Who designs the Commitment to Development Index (CDI)?
Until
2007 the CDI was maintained by the Center for Global Development and published in Foreign
Policy magazine; however, starting with 2007 CGD became the sole responsible party for maintaining and publishing the index. CGD staff and outside
collaborators designed and collected data for the seven individual components. David
Roodman is manager and chief architect. He also designed the aid
component and, in 2005, revised the trade component,
building on the work of CGD Senior Fellow William Cline. The collaborators are Theodore Moran of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service (investment), Kimberly Hamilton of the Migration Policy Institute and Jeanne Batalova (migration), B. Lindsay Lowell and Victoria Carro of Georgetown
University's Institute for the Study of International Migration (also migration), Amy Cassara and Daniel Prager of the World Resources Institute (environment), Michael O'Hanlon and Adriana Lins de Albuquerque of the Brookings Institution (security), and Keith Maskus of the University of Colorado at Boulder (technology).
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3. How did you decide what to include in the CDI?
Helping poor
countries is about more than aid. We chose major policy areas that support the development of poorer countries and for which reasonable data was available.
The list of policy areas is: aid, which funds initiatives such as child vaccinations and new roads; trade, which gives industries in poor countries access
to larger markets and creates jobs; investment, which can be a source of capital and good management practices; migration, which lets workers seek
higher-paying jobs in rich countries and send earnings back home; environment, which underscores the point that rich and poor nations are tied together by
shared resources; security, which is a prerequisite for development; and technology, since innovation is a critical factor in development.
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4. Did the way the CDI is computed change much between 2006 and 2007?
Very little. The aid component now properly credits donors for the small amounts of aid that go through two intermediaries, such as from
Germany to the European Commission to the World Bank to Tanzania. The weight the security component gives to arms exports was halved from 25% to 12.5%.
Since only a few countries export many arms, those countries’ exports are extremely high relative to the 21-country average, which gives them negative
scores for arms exports, large enough to throw their overall CDI standing. This influence seemed disproportionate to the overall importance of arms exports
relative to the many other variables in the CDI. In the environment component, net carbon emissions from land use and land use change, such as from
deforestation and reforestation, are now included in the greenhouse gas indicators. Another environment indicator, on whether countries have policies in
place to limit imports of illegally cut timber, was dropped because the meaningfulness of such formal policies was difficult to measure. (For more on the
scoring system, see FAQ#9).
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5. Why do the 2003–06 scores differ from the ones published in those years?
The CDI formulas and data have improved steadily since the first edition in 2003. Because of the changes in method, the latest scores are
not directly comparable to those published last year or the year before. If a country’s aid score climbs, say, that could be because of improvement in the
measurement rather than improvement in what is measured. The 2003-06 results featured on the website are back-calculations--applications of this year's
methodology to previous years' data. They allow fair comparisons over time. The original scores are available, however, in the previous-year technical
papers and spreadsheets on the Inside the Index page.
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6. Should the "winners" be proud?
Yes and no. We want to inspire
a race to the top, so "winners" should be proud of their achievements. Yet there is room for improvement in all rich countries. Almost all countries score
below average in at least one area and most are below average in at least three.
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7. How did you decide how to weight the components? Why aren't aid and trade given more
weight?
It is difficult to know whether a one-point increase in a country's aid score would be better for
development than a one-point increase in its trade score. And the potential benefits--perhaps a new school in Malawi, or more jobs for wheat farmers in
Argentina--are hard to compare to one another. Therefore, we chose equal weighting. All seven areas matter.
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8. Don't the United States and Japan give more aid and import more goods from developing countries than
any other rich country? Why don't they come out on top? Why do small countries such as Denmark and the Netherlands rank so well instead?
The Index assesses policy effort rather than impact. The United States and Japan give more aid in absolute terms, but they are
among the least generous once the size of their economies is taken into account. The top-scoring countries give a lot of aid in proportion to gross
domestic product and/or have relatively low trade barriers and/or generate relatively little pollution, and so on.
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9. Why does Austria score over 10 on migration? Why does Denmark do the same on aid?
Each component of the CDI combines many numbers into a single score, placing that score on a standard scale, so that 5
represents average performance by the standards of the first index year, 2003. This makes it easy to see that Japan's policies, for instance, are
above-average on technology (with a 6.3 in 2007), but not as
strong on security (1.7) by the standards of Japan's peers.
If a country is twice as good as average, it scores a 10, and if it's more than twice as good, it scores above 10. That happened to Austria on migration.
The opposite is true for the environment and trade components. Scores on environmental pollution and trade barriers start at 10 (no emissions or barriers)
and go down from there. Just as a country can power through the 10-point ceiling by giving more aid or admitting more immigrants, it can break through the
floor of zero by emitting excessive pollution or imposing high tariffs. In fact, the benchmark averages are from scores in the CDI’s first year, 2003.
Using a fixed benchmark allows proper score tracking over time.
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10. Where do the data come from?
Most of the data come from
official sources such as the United Nations, the World Bank, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the United Nations,
or from academic researchers. CGD and its collaborators also collect information country by country for parts of the aid, migration, investment components.
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11. Over what time frame is support for development measured?
The Index aims to measure support for development using the most recent available data as the best indicator of current policies. Most data are for 2003 or later. Contributions to humanitarian military interventions fluctuate considerably from year to year: in that case, we use multiyear averages as the best indicators of countries' long-term ability and willingness to contribute to internationally sanctioned interventions.
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12. How does the CDI handle the invasion of Iraq?
As a
relatively objective way to decide which military interventions should be counted, the security component of the CDI only includes contributions to
interventions approved by international bodies such as the U.N. Security Council, NATO, and African Union. Since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq had no such
mandate, it is not counted.
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