Tracking earmarked funding to international organizations: Introducing the Earmarked Funding Dataset

Over the past two decades, the funding of international development organizations such as the World Bank, the United Nations, and other multilateral implementing organizations has fundamentally transformed. On the one hand, core contributions—unearmarked resources that are pooled together and allocated under the purview of the main governing bodies—have stagnated. On the other hand, donors have provided increasing amounts of earmarked contributions, which receiving organizations must spend on specific themes, sectors, countries, or projects. Despite improvements in the official reporting on earmarked contributions, we lack systematic understanding of earmarked funding and the stringency of earmarking from the perspective of implementing organizations. This is the codebook for the Earmarked Funding Dataset, which extends the coverage of existing data in terms of sample years and multilateral institutions. In addition, the Earmarked Funding Dataset allows for comparisons of the stringency of earmarking across international organizations as well as within institutional sub-accounts. The data therefore are the primary choice for researchers who study the resourcing of international organizations and its consequences for bureaucratic autonomy and organizational performance