Public International Finance
Public International Finance
The finance from foreign governments is here taken at the nominal value - resources that come from public sources, irrespective of the objective of the spending, to have an overview of all that is provided/received. For practical reasons, as data on other public international flows are not readily available, the tables include grants, concessional loans, other official finance and UN peacekeeping operations.
Data sources
The data were taken in US$ (current prices) from OECD DAC Geobook and OECD DAC Table 1, and the constant price is calculated on the basis of the WB World Development Indicators' GDP deflators.
Main Issues
- The receipts of developing countries are double what is shown as provided by developed countries. This is because the operations of the multilateral organisations are not "providing countries". Also, they use donor funds to raise resources on the capital markets (leverage) and therefore increase the resources available to developing countries.
- The peacekeeping data are provided for providing countries, but it has not been broken down for recipient countries, as this is not available in the DAC database. On the "provider" side, there is some double counting on the contributions to peacekeeping, as a small part of these are also ODA-reported (7% of peacekeeping contributions). The recipients of PKO operations could be calculated on the basis of UN Peace Keeping Operations information.
Question
The Public International Finance monitoring and accounting is a relatively developed discussion area, with the OECD DAC leading the debates. In this context, it would be useful to see if there are other data sources that could be used to complete the picture on the provision and receipts of public international finance.
Are there better data sources or ways for calculating Public International Finance?