The OECD’s Development
Assistance Committee (DAC) will meet in Paris later this month to discuss the
ongoing process of re-examining the
definition of – and reporting criteria for – aid. This review could not come
soon enough as the EU, some of its
largest member states and multilateral development banks, are increasingly reporting profit-making
loans as aid due to outdated and ambiguous rules. Eurodad’s new report, A matter of high interest: Assessing how loans are reported as
development aid finds a
number of critical problems with the current reporting system. If the OECD DAC
review does not bring an end to lax reporting criteria, aid could be
artificially inflated by more than 50 billion euros in coming years. In an era when overall
aid budgets are declining globally, ...