Aid2Growth: From Poverty Reduction to Economic Growth: Aid, Business interests and Agenda 2030 – Sustainable Development Goals
DESCRIPTION
This project looks at how rich donors are progressively and explicitly transforming their international aid policies (ODA) to support their business and business interests. Since the 1960s, grants and concessional loans (or more simply APD) have been the main type of official aid offered by wealthy donors, along with debt relief and technical assistance. But ODA is no longer the main source of finance for the development of most developing countries, now supplanted by private financial flows: foreign direct investment (FDI), remittances, and philanthropy. Within the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), rich donors are discussing the modernization of ODA to include private sector instruments (PSI). This follows a period of budgetary austerity following the 2008 financial crisis and two major international conferences on ODA: Busan (2011) and Addis Ababa (2015). While the former highlighted the importance of the private sector to lead economic growth, the second opened the possibility to re-codify finance for development as Total Official Support for Sustainable Development (AOTDS). This emerging trend has been encouraged by the success of South-South Cooperation (SSC) since the early 2000s and by how it challenges the hegemony of the ODA paradigm of wealthy donors.
RESEARCH TEAM
Principal Researcher: Luís Mah (CEsA/CSG/ISEG-ULisboa)
Co-IR: Pedro Miguel Raposo de Medeiros Carvalho (CEsA/CSG/ISEG, ULisboa)
Researcher: Soyeun Kim (Sogang UniversitySeoul, Seoul, South Korea)
Researcher: Elsje Fourie (Maastricht University)
Researcher: Emma Mawdsley (University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies)
Researcher: Yang Jiang (Danish Institute for International Studies)
FUNDING
FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia