In 1969, the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee (DAC) created official development assistance (ODA) as a measure of foreign aid effort. To qualify as ODA, transactions had to be “concessional in character”.
The DAC has recently changed ODA reporting rules to include transactions that require no financial sacrifice. This deprives ODA of its meaning as a gauge of aid effort, and vitiates the point of setting the U.N. ODA target.
The changes have also rendered ODA incoherent as a statistical measure, making it a faulty tool for monitoring and analysis. ODA now fails to meet basic statistical quality standards.
Read the note here by Simon Scott
