Busan Alert: The United States Is Still a Unilateralist

Mitt Romney (or is it Newt Gingrich) keeps accusing President Obama of apologizing for the United States – probably because Obama sees the world not only through unilateralist eyes. He is too much the multilateralist for their tastes.Maybe so. But in at least one area the Obama Administration has so far eschewed multilateralism: foreign aid.This table shows the percentage of aid donor countries’ total aid channeled through multilateral organizations (aid provided as core support to multilateral organizations) in 2008 (pre-Obama Administration) and 2009 (the latest year for which comparable data are available across many donors). European donors channeled about 30 percent of their total aid through multilateral institutions in 2009. The percentage for the United States was 12 percent – up, but only slightly, from 2008.In the 2010 and 2011 editions of the QuODA assessment, Homi Kharas and I find that the quality of aid delivered by and through multilateral agencies is better than that delivered by bilateral agencies, at least on average. That’s especially true for aid from countries like the United States, since the latter’s bilateral programs score especially poorly on quality overall (as Connie Veillette sets out here). To ensure overall higher quality of its aid dollars, it would make more sense for the United States to send much more its aid money over to the World Bank, IDA, or the Global Fund to Fight Aids, TB and Malaria, or the African Development Fund (as we recommend in the case of aid to Pakistan in this report).Why doesn’t that happen? Mostly politics. . . .(For the summary table of U.S. scores on other aspects of aid quality in the second edition of our Quality of ODA ssessment – QuODA -- go here.)