Official Development Assistance (ODA)
Official Development Assistance (ODA) has faced a chronic issue. Official Development Assistance (ODA) has faced a chronic issue, a question of whether external grants and some other sources of aid for development of recipients are recognized for high input-effectiveness. To hurdle the controversy, some suggest that investing more costs in ODA is only a solution and criticize donors’ inactiveness on endowing aid funds. Unlike their claim, the problem is more closely related to the methodology, considering a gradual increase in the volume of international ODA contributions.
This paper offers how donors can enhance the level of aid effectiveness with three parts. First, donors should always consider the possible corruption of ODA project that they plan. Corruption is a main cause of delaying the economic growth of developing countries. Second, it is better to provide not grants which do not have any condition, but infrastructures. This support can be either grants for constructing the infrastructures or building them by donors. Third, brain drain of recipient countries has to be restricted by ODA projects. Their highly skilled workers take a pivotal role of continuous economic growth in such recipients. Thus, donors should organize the ODA programs that create environment which can bring back their original talented individuals from overseas and stop the leakage of their brains.
Official Development Assistance (ODA)
After the end of World War Ⅱ, the European Recovery Program which is also called Marshall Plan of the United States to boost European economies with supplying capital and technical expertise provided a seat for establishment of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 1961. Since then, the DAC adapted the concept of Official Development Assistance (ODA) to set the international indicator of aid worldwide. Under the term, ODA, each of donor countries has offered human, material, financial or other types of resources to developing countries to reach the aid targets that the United Nations adopted (Aza, O, 2016).
Today, ODA encounters a criticism in that it is inefficient; hence it is regarded as a waste of tax payers’ money, argued by some critics. They insist that even ODA has a myriad of counter effects including entrenching over-dependence of recipient countries on the West and distorting markets, and it rather becomes a role of brake on development of developing countries (Carbonnier, 2010). Furthermore, such negative impacts of ODA now go so far as to lead donor countries to feel aid fatigue (Bauhr et al, 2013).