قطعه قطعه شدن اهداکننده و کیفیت بوروکراتیک در دریافت کنندگان کمک

We analyze the impact of donor fragmentation on the quality of government bureaucracy in aid-recipient nations. A formal model of a donor's decision to hire government administrators to manage donor-funded projects predicts that the number of administrators hired declines as the donor's share of other projects in the country increases, and as the donor's concern for the success of other donors' projects increases. The model's predictions are consistent with results from cross-country empirical tests, using an index of bureaucratic quality available for aid-recipient nations over the 1982–2001 period.

The success of Marshall Plan aid, relative to aid to less developed countries more recently, is partly attributable to differences between the groups of recipients. Western Europe had huge advantages in putting aid to effective use. Unlike most aid recipients of subsequent decades, it had skilled labor, experienced managers and entrepreneurs, and a history of reasonably effective financial and judicial systems, and public administrations (Degnbol-Martinussen and Engberg-Pedersen, 2003: 288). However, differences on the donor side also may have contributed to the Marshall Plan's greater success. Marshall Plan recipients had to deal only with a single donor, in contrast to the dozens of bilateral and multilateral agencies and hundreds of NGOs in the aid business today. Also, Marshall Plan aid, “history's most successful structural adjustment program” (DeLong and Eichengreen, 1993), was not disbursed in the form of hundreds of separate donor-managed projects in each recipient nation.1 Aid success stories in Taiwan, Botswana and Korea have also been attributed in part to the presence of a single or dominant donor (Brautigam, 2000 and Azam et al., 1999). In contrast, recent recipients of development assistance interact with dozens of donors, each with projects in a large and increasing number of economic sectors (World Bank, 2001). The UNDP Resident Representative in Lesotho in 1981 counted 61 donors financing 321 projects, in a country of only 1.4 million people (Morss, 1984). In 2002, there were 25 bilateral and 19 multilateral donors and about 350 international NGOs operating in Vietnam, accounting for over 8000 development projects (Acharya et al., 2003). In the typical African country, aid is provided by “some thirty official donors in addition to several dozen international NGOs…through over a thousand distinct projects and several hundred resident foreign experts” (Van de Walle, 2001: 58). Hundreds of missions monitor and evaluate these projects and programs annually in many recipients, and each mission expects to meet with key government officials and to obtain comments from officials on its reports (Van de Walle and Johnston, 1996). There are several reasons why aid may be more effective when it is delivered by a single or dominant donor. In a recipient with many donors, each responsible for only a small part of development assistance, responsibility for success or failure is diffused, and any single donor will rarely have much of a stake in the country's economic and social development (Belton, 2003). Aid entails a set of collective action problems when there are multiple donors, each concerned with development in the recipient country, but with their own national goals as well, that sometimes conflict with development objectives. Donor countries all have their own commercial and security objectives, and their aid agencies additionally have the objective of maximizing aid budgets, requiring them to cater to key domestic constituencies in parliament and among aid contractors and advocacy groups. This latter objective often requires making the results of aid programs visible, quantifiable, and directly attributable to the donor's activities—even when doing so reduces the developmental impact of aid. From the perspective of a recipient country's welfare, incentives for any one donor to shirk on activities that maximize overall development in favor of activities that contribute to donor-specific goals strengthen as the number of donors increases. Because supplier cartels are typically created to raise the price of their products, donor coordination may be viewed as a hindrance to development in aid recipients. However, donors have a common interest in development, as well as their separate “private” goals which lead to practices such as tying aid, hiring away key government staff to run their projects, etc. Collusion by suppliers in this setting often reduces rather than increases the “price” of aid, and some forms of competition among donors can increase its price. Donor cooperation (collusion) sometimes takes the form of imposing unwelcome policy conditions, although government resistance to them is not always motivated by concern over their possible adverse effects on poor people's welfare. Costs associated with a proliferation of donors can be grouped into two broad categories. Some costs are primarily of a short-term and reversible nature, “merely” wasting resources unnecessarily. For example, tying aid to the employment of donor-country contractors has been estimated in an OECD study to reduce its real value by between 15% and 30% (Jepma, 1991). Transaction costs associated with numerous and diverse donor rules and procedures for managing aid projects and programs, different languages and fiscal calendars, etc. (see Berg, 1993: 81; UNDP, 2003: 148) can also be viewed as detracting from aid's value.2 In Vietnam, it took 18 months and the involvement of 150 government workers to purchase five vehicles for a donor-funded project, because of differences in procurement policies among aid agencies (World Bank, 2003). In Bolivia, five donors sponsoring a single poverty survey each required separate financial and technical reporting, leading the government official assigned to the project to spend nearly as much of her time meeting these requirements as in undertaking the actual survey (World Bank, 2003). There is much duplication in “country analytic work” such as poverty assessments, public expenditure reviews, governance and investment climate assessments, and fiduciary analyses sponsored by donors (OECD, 2003: ch. 2). Authors of these reports frequently are unaware of recent studies on the same topic in the same country sponsored by a different donor (Easterly, 2003: 15). The second category of costs is more insidious and long-lasting, involving donor practices that tend to undermine the quality of governance or retard the development of public sector capacity. A few examples of these practices include providing aid through projects rather than through budget support, bypassing central government units (for example, by the use of project implementation units), relying on expatriates instead of subsidizing “learning by doing” by hiring local staff, and funding investment projects that in the aggregate imply unrealistically high recurrent expenditures in future years—so that roads are often built but not repaired, and schools are built but not staffed (Brautigam, 2000). Donors engage in these practices to increase the visibility of their efforts and the short-term appearance of success for their individual projects, at the expense of coherent policy making and capacity building in the recipient country's public sector (World Bank, 1998: 84). It is well-known in the aid business that however successful a project appears on its own terms, it will have little or no sustained impact in a poor sector-policy environment, and where it is not integrated into other donor-funded or government projects (Easterly, 2003: 7; Kanbur and Sandler, 1999: 29). However, where there are numerous donors, any one of them would gain only a small share of the total benefits, in terms of project success, from devoting resources to improving administrative capacity in the country, and would be subsidizing the success mostly of other donors' projects. Section 2 below examines in more detail one particular practice of this sort, namely donor “poaching” of qualified local staff. Following a summary of related literature, a simple formal model of poaching is presented. 3 and 4 provide empirical tests. Cross-country data for testing the model's predictions are described in Section 3, with results reported in Section 4. Results support the hypothesis that aid undermines quality of the government bureaucracy more severely in recipient countries where aid is fragmented among more donors. These results are consistent with predictions of the model in Section 2, but are also consistent with other arguments from Section 1 on how donor fragmentation may affect bureaucratic capability in developing countries. Section 5 summarizes and discusses possible reforms in aid delivery.

This study provides a formal analysis and empirical evidence suggesting that competitive donor practices, where there are many small donors and no dominant donor, erode administrative capacity in recipient country governments. In their need to show results, donors each act to maximize performance of their own projects, and shirk on provision of the public sector human and organizational infrastructure essential for the country's overall long-term development.28 Empirical findings show that bureaucratic quality suffers where aid is fragmented more severely across donors. Proxies for donor altruism tend to be associated with improving bureaucratic quality, although these variables are not always significant. These empirical findings are consistent with the predictions of the “poaching” model in Section 2, but they are also consistent with other mechanisms presented more informally in Section 1 by which donor fragmentation may erode bureaucratic capability in aid recipients. Evidence of unintended damaging effects of aid does not necessarily imply that the net effects of aid on development are negative. Donors' use of human resources, however sub-optimal, may sometimes be more efficient than the government's use of them. Rather, the implication of this paper is that donor practices produce less damaging side effects when donors have a higher share of the aid market in a recipient country or when they are more altruistic (i.e., motivated more by development concerns). Moreover, the point is not that donors should refrain from hiring local staff. Relying more heavily on expensive expatriates to run projects would prevent valuable learning-by-doing on the part of local staff. The point, rather, is that donors should take better care not to distort unduly the market for skilled labor. The resource injection from high donor-paid salaries may well have a positive net impact on development, despite adverse impacts on the functioning of government. However, those same benefits could be obtained, without the negative consequences, from using the funds to increase salaries of underpaid civil servants, or through general budget support. Budget support targeted for increasing salaries of senior and technical staff–particularly where the use of merit systems increases the presumption that these officials are the ones worth retaining–would weaken incentives faced by qualified staff to defect to aid agencies or other employers. Tanzania is implementing a program of this sort, with funding from the British and Danish aid agencies (Yambesi, 2004). Other relevant reforms have been proposed. Agreements between government and donors are needed on codes governing recruitment, salary and benefit levels, and the use of government officials for part-time consultancy work (Fallon and da Silva, 1994: 101). Cohen and Wheeler (1997a: 318, 320–321) recommend tailoring training to enhance carefully specified skills directly related to responsibilities within a ministry, without granting academic credentials that facilitate mobility. They also recommend fewer hires at overstaffed lower grades, and using the savings to increase upper-level salaries to reduce pay disparities with alternative employers, but recognize the potential for political resistance as overstaffing lower grades is a prime source of patronage. Within donor agencies, accountability for broader objectives could be enhanced, by focusing more on output and country-level indicators, and less on input and project-level indicators. Staff performance appraisals could also take into account written evaluations of job performance from other donor staff, and from government counterparts (Whittington and Calhoun, 1988: 307). Ongoing efforts by aid agencies to improve donor coordination have focused to date on reducing transactions costs by harmonizing operational policies and procedures, such as standardizing reporting and monitoring systems,29 and establishing a web site to disseminate information on completed and planned country analytic work.30 The recent trend toward budget support and away from a projects focus by DfiD and a few other donors is often viewed as a means of reducing transactions costs for government officials. However, if budget support is coupled with more complex management requirements and demands by donors for deeper reform and better reporting, transactions costs may change very little, and the main benefits may come in the form of strengthening government systems (OECD, 2003: 122). Similarly, transactions costs in negotiating and managing more limited pooling schemes such as sector-wide programs in Mozambique and Zambia have sometimes been enormous (OECD, 2003: 116; Riddell, 1999: 334). More radical solutions would directly attack the problem of diffusion of responsibility. Greater donor accountability for overall results of a country's development program could be enhanced by formally designating a lead donor, which would thereby have an enhanced reputational stake in the country's overall development success. In aid-intensive countries, this scheme would not necessarily reduce the leverage of most recipients over donors, because the market for aid would remain highly contestable: donors wanting to be selected as the lead (or sole) donor would have to compete, by offering aid on a more favorable basis (such as untying it).31 In fact, recipient governments often plead for improved coordination among donors (e.g., see OECD, 2003: 121–122). Resistance to such a scheme by recipient governments would reflect principal–agent problems between citizens harmed by current donor practices and government officials benefiting from them, rather than any legitimate fear that smaller, better coordinated donor groups would impose less development-friendly aid policies. As an alternative to specializing among countries, donors could specialize by theme or sector, with some specializing in infrastructure, others in social sectors, and others in institutional and capacity building. Already, Japan tends to focus its aid in East Asia and the Pacific, and on infrastructure and economic sectors, while European donors focus more on Africa, and on social sectors and governance and human rights themes. Strong political forces and other interests work against further increases in specialization, however. Leaving certain problems or countries for other donors to deal with exposes an aid agency to charges by NGOs or the media that it is irresponsibly under-funding critically important development problems.32 Arcane justifications based on efficiency benefits of donor harmonization and comparative advantage are unlikely to be an effective public-relations response. Inter-agency funding could be a partial solution to this problem. Norway and Sweden both fund education and health sector programs in Ethiopia, but Sweden is arranging to channel its health funding through Norway, while Norway will channel its education funding through Sweden (OECD, 2003: 97). Competition at the global level among aid agencies also tends to inhibit specialization; for example the World Bank attempts to establish intellectual leadership in as many development themes and sectors as possible. Even the relatively altruistic “like-minded” bilateral donors proliferate aid across many recipients (Acharya et al., 2003), as aid agency officials derive prestige and influence from maintaining a global presence on par with the larger bilateral and multilateral agencies.33 Publicizing various measures of donor performance, by the OECD DAC or by independent organizations such as the Center for Global Development, could marginally improve the incentives faced by aid agencies. Performance measures could include not only the share of aid that is tied, but also measures of how each donor proliferates aid across recipients and sectors (Acharya et al., 2003), the share of aid channeled through multilateral organizations, the number of missions and reports required relative to aid levels, and frequency of delegation to lead donors. Acknowledgments