The Structure and Dynamics of International Development Assistance
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Michele Coscia
,
Ricardo Hausmann
Abstract
We study the structure of international aid coordination by creating and analyzing a tripartite network of donor organizations, recipient countries and development issues using web-based information. We develop a measure of coordination and find that it is moderate, achieving about 60% of its theoretical maximum. Many countries are strongly connected to organizations that are related to the issues that are salient there. Nevertheless, we identify many countries that are poorly served, issues that are inadequately attended to, and organizations that focus on the wrong combination of places and issues. Our approach may be used to improve decentralized coordination.
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For simplicity, we name organizations through their well-known acronyms. A list of acronyms and the organizational names is included in Table 1.
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http://www.devdir.org/stats.htm, May 30th, 2012.
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A public web API is a tool that allows programs to access web content directly. These are commonly used to build dynamic content, but can also be used to retrieve data.
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An alternative would be to consider a weighted measure, such as a correlation, rather than one based on cutoffs and counts. We did not take this route because we care about the quality of positive matches rather than the intensity of the negative matches. A regression approach treats both as symmetric. Secondly, correlation-based measures give higher weights to both positive and negative outliers and given the noise in the data, make the results less precise. This issue could be revisited if data based on triplets rather than pairs were used, as discussed in the concluding section.
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©2012 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Research Foundation
- Caught in a Poverty Trap? Testing for Single vs. Multiple Equilibrium Models of Growth
- Macroeconomic Policy Coordination in a Competitive Real Exchange Rate Strategy for Development
- Policy Analysis
- The Declining Labor Share of Income
- The Structure and Dynamics of International Development Assistance
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Articles in the same Issue
- Research Foundation
- Caught in a Poverty Trap? Testing for Single vs. Multiple Equilibrium Models of Growth
- Macroeconomic Policy Coordination in a Competitive Real Exchange Rate Strategy for Development
- Policy Analysis
- The Declining Labor Share of Income
- The Structure and Dynamics of International Development Assistance
- Latin America’s Trade and Growth Patterns, the China Factor, and Prebisch’s Nightmare
- Export Similarity Networks and Proximity Control Methods for Comparative Case Studies
