ABSTRACT
So far aid to India has been examined in a number of partial aspects-its implications for macroeconomic management, for the alleviation of poverty and for the development of Indian policy-making. In this chapter, a more holistic approach to aid is adopted, focusing on the question of whether aid has important ‘systemic effects’ on India’s political economy, and whether particular procedures of aid-giving could or should be modified in order to reduce adverse systemic effects, or increase beneficial systemic effects. The reason for asking questions like this is the fear that foreign aid may, in certain circumstances, have strong distorting effects on the recipient’s economy, and therefore that an evaluation method which concentrated only on the results of individual aided projects would fail to detect something important about the overall aid-giving process. Before proceeding to an analysis of aid project evaluations in the next chapter, it is necessary to tackle these larger and more comprehensive questions.
