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Jeroen Kwakkenbos, Stephanie Colin

16 Jan 2014 14:29:50

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largest member states and multilateral development banks, are increasingly reporting profit-making loans as aid due to outdated and ambiguous rules.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, ...

Stephanie Colin

12 Dec 2013 17:19:39

Recent discussions at the OECD DAC level have brought to light donor reporting practices that could potentially inflate aid significantly. This article raises issues about the reporting of concessional loans as ODA showing how profit-marking loans are putting the developmental logic of the system into question and how ambiguous rules have opened the system to abuse. A forthcoming Eurodad report assesses these donor practices in greater detail and provides clear recommendations to ensure that reporting requirements have a genuine developmental logic and are not open to abuse by donors. Concessional loans, known as loans that qualify as Official Development Assistance (ODA), were recently discussed at an expert workshop hosted by the OECD-DAC Working Party on Development Statistics (WP-STAT). ...

Stephanie Colin

18 Oct 2013 11:41:22

On 9 October, Eurodad took part in an international conference on tax evasion and financial transparency in Seoul, South Korea. The highly topical conference was jointly organised with our Korean partner, People’s Solidarity for Participatory Democracy (PSPD). Cracking down on offshore tax evasion has become a top priority for South Korean tax authorities since the first release of offshore stories by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) last May. The conference brought together about 60 participants, including experts on tax evasion from Korean academia and civil society and international guests from Eurodad and the Asian branch of the Financial Transparency Coalition, based in New Delhi, India. It provided a great opportunity for inspiring discussions ...

Stephanie Colin

04 Oct 2013 10:12:44

The OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) is currently reviewing the rules to report donors’ loans as Official Development Assistance (ODA). This discussion is taking place against a backdrop of aid cuts across Europe and raises concerns about the intentions of DAC donors. There are risks that the poor will be short-changed if the new rules make it easier for donors to inflate their aid figures further without making fresh money available and that debt sustainability will be undermined if loans are scaled-up.     In a context of development budget cuts across Europe, it is becoming increasingly unlikely that donors will meet the target of scaling up ODA to 0.7% of their gross national income by 2015, as they have committed to. European ODA disbursements ...