Measuring Policy Performance: Can We Do Better than the World Bank?

This article questions the relevance of the different measures of policy performance that are currently used by international organizations to allocate Official Development Assistance (ODA). It evaluates more especially the pertinence of the World Bank’s Country Policy and Institutional Assessment (CPIA) and of the various alternatives that have been proposed in the literature. It suggests a new way of assessing aid effectiveness. Measuring policy performance is of particular importance: ODA represents a limited but needed resource for developing countries. Finding criteria to allocate it selectively is thus of great concern for donors