Ideas to Action:
Independent research for global prosperity
We develop screens and principles designed to maximise the impact of aid, especially in richer recipients. All else equal, a dollar spent in the poorest countries will have a larger impact on well-being than a dollar spent in richer countries, so ODA should be concentrated in those countries.
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, official development assistance (ODA) remains an essential, though often criticised, form of external financing for developing countries.
COVID-19 and economic responses to it have amplified and changed the nature of development challenges in fundamental ways. Global development cooperation should adapt accordingly.
An evidence submission on the Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI).
If the ODA budget is to be cut, doing so will be painful, messy, and imperfect, but there is a way to wield the chisel well, says Ranil Dissanayake.
Countries provide aid for a variety of reasons, but if uncoordinated, the individual decisions of 30 OECD DAC donors and many more multilateral institutions can lead to wide and ineffective variations in how much aid countries receive.
This note explores what happens to the value of ODA loans if more realistic discount rates are chosen. In short, the value of ODA loans falls by over a half.
Is research into a Covid-19 vaccine a suitable use of Official Development Assistance (ODA)? This note attempts to tease apart a discussion of “is this ODA” from “is this a global public good?” and then separate out again “is this ODA and/or a global public good?” from “is this an efficient way to spend money?”
The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) recently produced a long-awaited set of rules for how debt relief on loans should be scored as Official Development Assistance (ODA). Unfortunately, the rules suffer from a number of statistical problems and the DAC needs to take these rules back to the drawing board, or lose credibility.
This note lays out calculations of the UK’s net fiscal contribution to the EU budget between the years 2008 to 2018, and quantifies the support provided to other EU countries to promote their economic growth, regional convergence and rural development, but which is not classified as aid.
Lee Robinson, Euan Ritchie, and Charles Kenny explore how the UK can heighten its R&D official development assistance spend.
Following the announcement of the merger between DfID and FCO, Stefan Dercon and Ranil Dissanayake take a look at the opportunities of the merger.
The Commitment to Development Index ranks 40 countries on their development policies. How did your country do this year?
On 30th April, Ian Mitchell submitted written evidence on aid effectiveness to the UK's International Development Select Committee.
This note updates and builds on analysis from 2014 by Stefan Dercon, which projects carbon dioxide emissions by the poorest countries to understand their likely future contribution to global emissions. Whilst these countries’ emissions are currently very low, there is concern that rapid economic growth could alter this picture.
In this working paper we present a new indicator—Finance for International Development (FID)—that attempts to fill this gap by measuring in a comparable way the flows of official, cross-border concessional finance provided by 40 major economies
As the UK undertakes “the biggest review of Britain's place in the world since the end of the Cold War,” our experts explore how global health could be incorporated into the integrated review.
The Kunming-Vientiane railway is an anchor investment of the Chinese government’s Belt and Road initiative. This case study will assess the rail project along four dimensions: economic implications; procurement arrangements; labor; and environmental and social safeguards. In each of these areas, evidence from the railway project suggests that Chinese policy and practice could be better aligned with the practices of other sources of multilateral and bilateral development finance.
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