Synopses & Reviews
This book analyzes the institutions--incentives and constraints--that guide the behavior of persons involved in the implementation of aid programs. While traditional performance studies tend to focus almost exclusively on policies and institutions in recipient countries, the authors look at incentives in the entire chain of organizations involved in the delivery of foreign aid, from donor governments and agencies to consultants, experts and other intermediaries. They examine incentives inside donor agencies, the interaction of subcontractors with recipient organizations, incentives inside recipient country institutions, and biases in aid performance monitoring systems.
Review
"The mjor merit of Martens' argument lies in his explicit plea in favor of the role evaluation pays in the information feedback loop by enlightening taxpayers about the `true` benefits of aid programs." Review of Political Economy, Mita Marra, Italian National Research Council
Synopsis
Analyses the institutions that guide the behaviour of people involved in delivery of foreign aid.
About the Author
Bertin Martens is an economist at the European Commission in Brussels. He has worked for various foreign aid organizations, including United Nations agencies and the European Commission, and he is a member of the International Society for New Institutional Economics.Professor Uwe Mummert is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Research into Economic Systems in Jena, Germany.Peter Murrell is Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland and currently holds a Chair on the Academic Council of the IRIS Center. He is the author of The Nature of Socialist Economies and Assessing the Value of Law in the Transition to Socialism, and is a contributor to various journals, including the American Economic Review and the Journal of Comparative Economics.Paul Seabright is Professor of Economics at the University of Toulouse. His many publications have focused on theoretical and applied microeconomics, and he is currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for Economic Policy Research.
Table of Contents
List of figures; Foreword Elinor Ostrom; 1. Introduction Bertin Martens; 2. Conflicts of objectives and task allocation in aid agencies Paul Seabright; 3. The interaction of donors, contractors and recipients in implementing aid for institutional reform Peter Murrell; 4. Embedding externally induced institutional reform Uwe Mummert; 5. The role of evaluation in foreign aid programmes Bertin Martens; 6. Some policy conclusions regarding organizations involved in foreign aid Bertin Martens; Index.