Aid Fragmentation and Effectiveness: What Do We Really Know?

Aid Fragmentation and Effectiveness: What do we Really Know? (With Katja Michaelowa, Axel Dreher, and Franziska Spörri), World Development 99 (11/ 2017) Summary Aid fragmentation is widely recognized as being detrimental to development outcomes. We reinvestigate the impact of fragmentation in the context of growth, bureaucratic policy, and education, focusing on a number of conceptually different indicators of fragmentation, and paying attention to potentially heterogeneous effects across countries, sectors, and channels of influence. Our systematic and detailed reexamination of existing empirical studies shows that this differentiation is crucial. In some sectors—such as primary education—donor concentration or limiting donor numbers appear to be detrimental rather than beneficial for development outcomes. In other areas, we find the expected negative effect, but only when we conceptualize fragmentation as a lack of lead donors (too limited concentration), rather than in terms of donor numbers. In all cases, sufficient initial administrative capacity in recipient countries prevents the negative and reinforces the positive effects of fragmentation. This stresses the importance of questioning the sweeping conclusions drawn by much of the previous literature. Based on what we currently know, generalizing judgments about the effect of aid fragmentation may be misleading.《援助碎片化与援助实效：我们究竟知晓多少？》（与卡特娅·米夏洛娃、阿克塞尔·德雷尔、弗朗齐斯卡·施普尔合作完成），载于《世界发展》2017年第11期第99卷 研究摘要。援助碎片化普遍被学界认为对发展成果有害。本研究围绕增长、官僚政策与教育三大领域，重新探讨援助碎片化的影响：研究重点采用多种概念维度各异的碎片化衡量指标，同时关注不同国家、部门及影响渠道间可能存在的异质性效应。我们对现有实证研究开展系统性且细致的重新审视后发现，这种维度区分至关重要。在部分领域（如初等教育），提升捐助方集中度或限制捐助方数量，似乎反而对发展成果有害而非有益。在其他领域，仅当我们将碎片化定义为缺乏牵头捐助方（即集中度过低）而非以捐助方数量进行衡量时，才能观察到预期的负向效应。在所有场景中，受援国具备充足的初始行政能力，均可抵消援助碎片化的负面影响，并强化其正面效应。这凸显了对既往大量研究中得出的笼统结论进行审慎反思的必要性。基于当前已有的认知，对援助碎片化效应作出一概而论的评判可能会产生误导。