Last week, the first of the European Commission’s “Development Papers”, written by staff of the Directorate General for Development (DG DEV), was presented to the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in London. The paper analyses the relationship between general budget support (GBS) and progress towards the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), and concludes that those developing countries which have received higher levels of GBS have performed better.

The EU website for the study states: “We find that high GBS recipients have performed better, often significantly so, in all four MDGs assessed (covering primary enrolment, gender parity in education, child mortality, and access to water), as well as in terms of improvements in the Human Development Index, in the period 2002-2007.”

“We also find that even after we control for the quality of the policy environment, income level and aid dependency, high GBS recipients have on average still performed better than other countries.”

You can read the paper in full at: http://ec.europa.eu/development/icenter/files/europa_only/budget_support_MDG_performance_development_paper_en.pdf

Sources:

• European Commission
• Europafrica.net