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December 1997 Insights Issue #24
Back to Insights #24
Lomé is not the only fruit:
EU aid programmes in perspective
The Overseas Development Institute (ODI)
recently published an inventory of all European Community aid to
developing and transition countries, concentrating on the period
1986-95. For the first time, it sets aid through the Lomé Convention in
the context of all other European-level aid programmes now in existence,
notably those funded through the EC general budget. Those programmes
included:
- aid to Asia and Latin America (the ALA
programme, which started just a couple of years after Lomé I was
signed)
- the MED programme to most of the Southern
and Eastern Mediterranean (viz North African and West Asian) states
- food aid programmes worldwide
- aid to the Central and East European
Countries (CEECs) and to the newly independent states (NIS) of
former USSR, mainly the PHARE and TACIS programmes
- humanitarian assistance, mainly (though not
exclusively - see the Court of Auditors' Report of May 1997)
channelled through a separate agency, ECHO.
In addition, there is a growing number of special and sometimes
sporadic budget lines such as the HIV/AIDS programme and the Special
Programme for Assisting the Victims of Apartheid, the latter a surrogate
South African aid programme from 1986 to 1994. It is in this context
that the once-dominant Lomé aid programme now appears to be stagnating
both in absolute volume, (though this is largely because of inability to
spend or, in the case of EDF VIII, to ratify the revised Convention),
and in proportionate terms. It is now dipping near 30 percent of total
aid as other schemes surge ahead.
Disbursements to the ACP in 1995 (the latest figure available) were
2.3bn ECU, or 41.5 percent of total aid, but a freeze on numerous
disbursements and the failure to start the Eighth European Development
Fund has now reduced the share considerably. Other signs of relative
decline are:
- from 1986-90, seven of the top 10 recipients
of EC aid were ACP countries but between 1991 and 1995 only three
out of 10 leading recipients (Ethiopia, Rwanda and Mozambique) were
ACP members.*
- the loss to the ACP has not 'enriched' other
poor developing - or even least-developed - countries. The ALA share
in fact fell from 15.3 to 13.6 percent
- even the Mediterranean countries only do
well in terms of pledges and commitments: actual disbursements are
lagging behind. In 1995 they stood at 10.5 percent of total payments
(578m ECU), down from 18.6 percent in 1986.
The top beneficiaries have been the PHARE and TACIS programmes which
together with other aid to the former CMEA states (not least, emergency
aid to Bosnia and ECHO operations), now (1995) account for 28.7 percent
of total EC aid, split more than half still to the states of Central and
Eastern Europe and just over a third (12 percent of the total) to the
ex-Soviet Union. Yet disbursements were negligible until 1990: see these
bar charts:
Changes in top 10 major recpients of EC aid
(commitments, m ECU)
Disbursements of EC aid by region
- ACP - Asia, Caribbean & Pacific
- NIS - newly independent states of the former USSR
- CEEC - Central & E. European countries
- TACIS - Technical Assistance Programme for Commonwealth of
Independent States
*This includes some indivisible aid to Rwanda and Burundi that was
counted as Rwanda's.
Adrian Hewitt
Overseas Development Institute,
Portland House,
Stag Place,
London SW1E 5DP
UK
T: +44 (0) 171 393 1600
F: +44 (0) 171 393 1699
E: a.hewitt@odi.org.uk
URL: http://www.oneworld.org/odi |
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