Targeting development: critical perspectives on the millennium development goals. Edited by Richard Black And Howard White (London and New York: Routledge, 2004, pp. 384). New development strategies: beyond the Washington Consensus. Edited by Akira Kohsaka (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004, pp. 308). The pattern of aid giving: the impact of good governance on develoment assistance. Edited by Eric Neumayer (London: Routledge, 2003, pp. 116)

✍ Scribed by Bazoumana Ouattara

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 44 KB
• Volume: 18
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0954-1748
• DOI: 10.1002/jid.1272

✦ Synopsis

The charge that aid politicises economic life is a useful starting point for thinking about aid's limits and potentialities. Part I of the collection contains 12 articles on the international political economy of aid. Aid's potentialities are seen to be defined by recipients' administrative and political characteristics, which has clear implications for the nature of donor-recipient relations that ought to be aspired to. The scope for policy conditionality (aid given in exchange for policy reform) is seen to be extremely limited because of domestic political constraints on implementing unwelcome policy reform, which points to the desirability of less hierarchical donor-recipient relations such as ownership and partnership. Articles are included that define, present the case for, and discuss the inner tensions of, domestic ownership of the reform process (e.g. Burnell; Killick) and partnership between donors and recipients (e.g. Maxwell and Riddell). Aid effectiveness in this part of the collection is not limited to its contribution to economic growth but includes more recent objectives, such as promoting democracy (Carothers), gender equality (Richey), NGOs (Edwards and Hulme) and environmental sustainability (Connolly).

Part II narrows the focus to aid's contribution to economic growth. It contains five articles that between them present the traditional financing-gap approach to thinking about aid's role (Bacha); the limitations to that role that arise from a recipient public sector that pursues its own objectives (Mosley, Hudson and Horrell); the empirical analysis that supports current orthodoxy on aid effectiveness-that its contribution to economic growth hinges on the quality of recipients' policies and institutions (Burnside and Dollar); and a thorough empirical critique of that analysis (Hansen and Tarp). The latter draws the cautious conclusion that conditioning aid on recipient policies is premature: we simply do not know enough yet about the precise conditions that make aid more effective, at least not to the extent that discrimination between countries on the basis of their policies can be done reliably with any great precision.

Part III contains four articles on another complicating factor: an assessment of aid's effectiveness should take note of its effect on recipient fiscal aggregates and the composition of public spending. The articles included provide comprehensive coverage of the development of this literature (Heller; Pack and Pack; Franco-Rodriguez, Morrissey and McGillivray). Whereas the focus in the first three parts of the collection is on limits to aid effectiveness that arise from recipient behaviour, parts IV and Vof the collection consider issues arising from donor motivation. Five articles (part IV) consider aid allocation and motivations of donors, especially foreign policy (including McKinlay and Little; Maizels and Nissanke; Schraeder, Hook and Taylor). Six articles (part V) include commercial influences on tied aid (Morrissey) and studies of the US (Clarke) and Japan (Yasutomo; Hook and Zhang).

The value of a collection such as this lies, of course, in the skill with which the selection of contributions to the literature has been carried out. In this the editors have done an admirable job. The collection is an attractive combination of seminal articles and more recent articles that represent the state of the art on a topic; and the selection process is carefully justified in the introduction, which also summarises the main contribution of each included article to the wider literature on aid effectiveness. Policymakers and practitioners should benefit greatly from having all these articles together in one volume, and it would also make an excellent reader for a Master's course on the political economy of aid.