Development Assistance Committee - Statistics

Statistics

Since its inception, one of the DAC's main functions has been to collect and publish statistics on aid flow. As noted in the Achievements section of this article, in 1969 the DAC's members adopted a criterion for calculating their aid contributions. They called the resulting measure of aid contributions Official Development Assistance (ODA). It has become widely used by other organisations, and scholars, as a general measure of aid; for example, the United Nations and the World Bank both commonly use ODA as calculated by the DAC as their measure of aid. This is in spite of the fact that it is not an entirely comprehensive measure. It includes only aid from government sources; aid from private sources, including NGO's, is not counted. About ten to fifteen percent of aid comes from private sources.

ODA includes developmental and humanitarian aid, the latter being much the smaller of the two. It does not include aid for military use. It includes both outright grants and loans, as long as the loans are on significantly easier terms than the commercial norm: the DAC calls these "concessional" loans. The change to the definition of ODA in 1972 involved tightening the definition of "concessionality". The DAC defines concessionality according to a mathematically computed "grant element"; loans with a grant element of at least 25 percent are considered concessional and count as ODA. This criterion has not been changed since 1972.

Loans made in a given year that are counted towards ODA are counted net of repayments made that year on the principal of old loans, but not net of interest payments. Therefore, after a loan has been paid back its overall effect on ODA figures is zero. (Its overall direct fiscal effect on the recipient is of course that the recipient has had to pay back some amount of interest.)

Debt forgiveness is counted explicitly as a category of ODA.

The DAC computes ODA from data submitted by its member states. It also has collected some data on the OPEC countries' aid donations, which are significant: in fact OPEC donations are currently about twice that of the DAC countries' as a fraction of donor gross national income.

Only aid to countries on the DAC List of ODA Recipients counts as ODA. Initially it included most developing countries. After the fall of Communism in Europe in the early 1990s the Eastern European countries and the Soviet Union, which had formerly been donors of aid, became aid recipients, albeit wealthier ones than most developing countries. Because of this and because some formerly poor East Asian countries were now middle-income, the DAC in 1993 divided the list of recipients into two parts, on the basis of national income. Only aid to countries in the lower income part (Part I) counted as ODA. Aid to countries in the upper income part was put into a new category called Official Assistance (OA), separate from ODA. This bifurcated list was abolished in 2005, however, because of the confusion and accounting difficulties that were occasioned when countries moved from one part to the other of the list. The current list (2007) includes all countries with per capita GNI less than $11 455, except that it excludes countries that are members of the G8, or the EU, or that have a firm accession date for EU membership. Movement of countries on or off the list has caused the DAC to retroactively change past ODA figures for some group categories.

Besides ODA, the DAC keeps statistics on three other major categories:

• Other Official Flows (OOF) are transactions by the official sector (not private) that are not "development-motivated" or not concessional. The main items in OOF are export credits, official sector equity and portfolio investment, and debt reorganisation.
• Private Flows consists mostly of investment by transnational corporations and private banks, and export credits given by industries. The figures for Private Flows and OOF are

quite volatile from year to year because they represent a balance between positive and negative flows.

• Net Private Grants. This is mostly aid from private sources such as NGOs.