U.S. Ranks 14th In Annual Index Of Foreign Aid

Because of massive assistance to Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years and initiatives to fight HIV and AIDS, the United States and Britain have provided more foreign aid to developing nations than ever before, according to David Roodman, a research fellow at the Washington-based Center for Global Development. But total amounts are not everything.

According to this year's Commitment to Development Index, compiled by averaging measures in seven policy areas, the Netherlands comes first and Japan last in the 21 countries included in the study. Britain ranks ninth, and the United States is 14th.

Roodman is the author of the study, which factors in performance on aid, trade, investment, the environment, security, technology and migration. Moral obligation and security concerns are the obvious motivations for developed countries such as the United States and Britain to give aid, but the index is not a simple measure of funds.

"U.S. aid to Iraq was $10 billion in 2005, the last year for which we have data. That is one of the largest country-to-country aid flows ever," Roodman said. But "the CDI only counts that aid at 10 cents on the dollar because of high corruption and weak rule of law."

Beyond the quantity of aid, the index penalizes donors for giving assistance to rich or corrupt governments or tying aid to the purchase of their own goods, which limits recipients' ability to shop around for the lowest price, according to a detailed posting on the Center for Global Development's Web site, http://www.cgdev.org.

Roodman said China is normally not included in the index because of its low per-capita annual income -- $1,595 compared with America's $38,165 at the official exchange rate. India is also not included in the regular index.

This year, Roodman said, he wanted to focus on the environment and looked at China and India just in that one category. In terms of gas emissions that cause global warming, one American's emissions are equivalent to those of four Chinese or nine Indians. "However, China and India are building a lot of coal plants and buying cars," Roodman said. "Rich countries should take the lead, but we should not let developing countries off the hook."

On trade, the study said the system of rules governing world trade has acted as a barrier to some of the goods that poor countries are best at producing. William R. Cline, a senior fellow at the Center for Global Development, is quoted in the study as saying that if rich countries removed remaining trade barriers, it would lift 200 million people out of poverty.