Friday 17 June 2011

AidWatch Report: EU ‘self-interest’ inflates aid by over €5bn in 2010

Launched in Brussels on 19th May, this year’s AidWatch report Challenging self-interest: Getting EU aid fit for the fight against poverty says that:

• Aid is becoming increasingly dictated by domestic political agendas and tied to security, immigration and commercial objectives.
• In 2010 EU member states inflated official aid spending by more than €5bn.This is equivalent to almost 10% of the total aid provided by the EU to partner countries last year. €2.5 billion of this amount was debt cancellation, roughly €1.6 billion was student costs and about €1.1 billion was spent on refugees in donor countries.
• The EU is the world’s biggest aid donor but in 2010, only nine countries1 met their EU aid targets.

This analysis is based on figures released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in April, which showed that the EU spent €54.82bn on aid (0.43% of GNI) falling short of its commitment by nearly €15 billion.

Of the EU-12 countries none reached the 2010 target of 0.17 % of GNI spending on ODA with the exeption of Cyprus which reached 0.19% GNI. The general trend of inflating official aid spending is also common in EU-12 countries.

CONCORD has launched a website dedicated to explaining the trends underpinning EU and member states’ aid decisions, including country by country reporting at http://aidwatch.concordeurope.org/

Information provided by CONCORD

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