Earmarked aid to international organizations has quadrupled over the last two decades and now represents almost 20% of total aid. This paper introduces a new dataset on earmarked aid, which alternatively has been referred to as multi-bi, restricted, non-core or trust fund aid. The data make it possible to track the rise of the new aid channel over an extended time period and in greater detail regarding, e.g., the implementing multilateral organizations. The data include more than 100,000 earmarked projects of 23 OECD donors to 290 multilateral institutions from 1990 to 2012. We graphically illustrate the patterns in earmarked aid for all actors: donor governments and their aid-providing agencies, multilateral organizations, and recipient countries. We also highlight promising research questions that can be analyzed with the multi-bi data. In a first empirical application of the data, we analyze four suggested donor motives for earmarked aid at the donor-recipient level. Contrary to donor claims, we find that earmarked aid and bilateral aid target the same recipients. We also find evidence that some donors use earmarked aid to bypass recipient countries with weak governance. Overall, our explorative analysis suggests that earmarked aid serves many purposes and that donors use it in different ways. This calls for more fine-grained research on the reasons and implications for earmarked aid.

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What determines earmarked funding to international development organizations? Evidence from the new multi-bi aid data

Low fee private schooling in India – More questions than answers? Observations from the Young Lives longitudinal research in Andhra Pradesh

Development Co-Operation: Efforts and Policies of the Members of the Development Assistance Committee, 1987 Report

The existence of under-aided countries, sectors, and sub-national regions – also known as “aid orphans” – implies inefficiencies in the current overall allocation of aid resources. This is of particular concern because aid effectiveness depends not only on how well resources are utilised, but also on how efficiently they are allocated across recipients and uses. Different conceptual approaches to aid allocation, as well as spillovers across countries and sectors, make it difficult to define an “optimal allocation” and thus to pin down the criteria for identifying cases of “insufficient aid”. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify countries whose aid receipts are considerably lower than others with similar characteristics, as well as sectors that receive insufficient aid while donors crowd in other areas. Donor coordination and transparency in aid allocations are crucial for addressing the problem and achieving a more efficient allocation of resources.

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Forgotten or unpromising? : The elusive phenomenon of under-aided countries, sectors and sub-national regions

The rapid growth of trust funds at multilateral development organizations has been widely neglected in the academic literature. We examine sovereign donors' choices among various trust fund options and contend that the choice among the different trust funds involves a fundamental trade-off: larger funds provide donors with “burden-sharing” benefits, but each donor can better assert its individual preferences in a fund with fewer other donors. The theoretical considerations yield testable hypotheses on a range of factors affecting this fundamental trade-off, most notably the area of the trust fund's intervention and donor countries' competing domestic interests. A large-N analysis of participation decisions of OECD/DAC donors in trust funds over the past decade mostly corroborates these hypotheses. In particular, ex ante preference alignment among donors as well as indicators for global activities and fragile states aid are robust determinants of participation in (large) multi-donor funds. In contrast, a donor tends to prefer a single-donor fund in areas where its national interests dominate.

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Which donors, which funds? Bilateral donors' choice of multilateral funds at the World Bank

vi Executive summary viii 1. Background 1 1.1 Aims and rationale for review 1 1.2 Definitional and conceptual issues 2 1.3 Policy and practice background 13 1.4 Research background 16 1.5 Objectives 18 2. Methods used in the review 19 2.1 User involvement 19 2.2 Identifying and describing studies 20 2.3 Methods for synthesis 23 2.4 Deriving conclusions and implications 26 3. Search results 27 3.1 Studies included through searching and screening 27 3.2 Details of included studies 28 4. Synthesis results 32 4.1 Further details of studies included in the synthesis 32 4.2 Synthesis of evidence 32 4.3 Synthesis: quality assurance results 36 4.4 Summary of the results of the synthesis 36 5. Strengths and limitations 38 5.1 Strengths 38 5.2 Limitations 39 6. Conclusions and recommendations 43 6.1 Conclusions 43 6.2 Recommendations 45 7. References 51 7.1 Studies included in review 51 7.2 References used in the text of the technical report 52 7.3 Studies not included in the final data set, but with relevant information ......... 55

http://r4d.dfid.gov.uk/pdf/outputs/systematicreviews/Q48_Multidonor_trust_fund_2012Barakat(2)FINAL.pdf

What is the track record of multi donor trust funds in improving aid effectiveness? An assessment of the available evidence.

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K. Rzeszut

Papers

What is the track record of multi donor trust funds in improving aid effectiveness? An assessment of the available evidence.

The evidence for the sustainable scale-up of low-cost private schools in South West Asia.