ABSTRACT
With around $19.7 billion allocated to Official Development Assistance (ODA), the United States was the world’s largest bilateral donor in 2004. As ODA was only 0.17 per cent of its gross national income, the United States, in relative terms, was at the same time one of the least generous donors in the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2006a). On 14 March 2002, President Bush announced his plan for the so-called Millennium Challenge Account (MCA), which aimed at a gradual increase of the US budget for development assistance and should result in additional spending of $5 billion a year as of FY 2006. In a speech to the Inter-American Development Bank, Bush called the MCA ‘a “new compact for development” that increases accountability for rich and poor nations alike, linking greater contributions by developed nations to greater responsibility by developing nations’ (US Government 2002).
