ABSTRACT
Foreign aid is the primary means by which industrialized countries have attempted to promote economic development in poor countries. And it is big business. Sums spent in Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) by OECD countries have been considerable, amounting to some US$3 trillion since 1970 and an annual fl ow of US$151 billion in 2012. Over the last fi ve decades, development aid has evolved in response to a dramatically changing global, political, and economic landscape. In this chapter, we examine this evolution and discuss what seems to determine the eff ectiveness of aid as seen by donors, intended benefi ciaries, and outside observers (positive analysis), and what could be done to make aid more eff ective (normative analysis). We shall see that the heterogeneity of means, needs, and actors makes aid an extremely complex institutional universe, with both dismal failures and exciting successful initiatives.
