A world in need.

• Author: Kumar, Supriya
• Position: WORLD WATCHER

AS THE WORLD approaches its 2015 deadline for achieving the Millennium Development Goals outlined in 2000, development aid by the 26 members of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development is declining, according to a Vital Signs report from Worldwatch Institute, Washington, D.C. After peaking at $136,700,000,000 in 2010, the annual amount given has gone down more than six percent.

The U.S. provides the largest amount of official development assistance (ODA) to the DAC--almost 25%. Behind the U.S. are the United Kingdom, Germany, France, and Japan. When tracking ODA as a percentage of gross national income (GNT), however, a different picture emerges. Since 1970 the United Nations has set 0.7% of GNI as the target for ODA: only Luxembourg, Sweden, Norway, and Denmark exceeded this target last year. In comparison, the U.S. figure was 0.19%. Not surprisingly, given the severity of the economic crisis, the 15 European Union members of DAC decreased their assistance by a total of 7.4%, with the most severe cuts coming from Spain, Italy, Greece, and Portugal.

It should be noted that DAC governments are not the only ones that provide development assistance: according to a UN report, non-DAC countries donated a total of $7,200,000,000 in development aid in 2010, with Saudi Arabia providing almost half of the total. Furthermore, assistance from private sources was estimated at $56,000,000,000 that same year, but reporting on such flows is much weaker than for government funds.

Humanitarian assistance, or short-term aid provided in response to disasters and humanitarian crises, is a numerically small but highly visible portion of ODA. Preliminary data indicates that assistance provided by governments for such purposes fell 6.5%, from $13,800,000,000 to $12,900,000,000. (When including nongovernmental sources, humanitarian aid fell by 1.1%) This decline is not totally unexpected, as many of the world's leading economies still are recovering from the financial crisis. Also, the United Nations categorized 76,000,000 people as in need of humanitarian assistance, fewer than the 93,000,000 in 2011.

"ODA is far from the only mechanism of international capital flows to or from developing countries and emerging markets," says Cameron Scherer, report coauthor and program associate at the international NGL Internews. "A multitude of vehicles--private and public, bilateral and multilateral--fill the...