An examination of bilateral donor performance and progress under the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness

This article examines aid effectiveness across bilateral donors using data from the 2011 Survey on Monitoring the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness. We find that, while several donors, including Canada, improved their performance from 2005 to 2010, many did not meet their targets. To determine whether the Paris Declaration mattered, we test several hypotheses derived from the "international norms and discourse" pathway that Bernstein and Cashore propose for how global governance can influence domestic policy. We find that generosity and transparency of donor countries correlate positively with aid effectiveness results in 2010, whereas ideology and transparency correlate with progress achieved in 2005-2010