The body in charge of maintaining and improving the quality, comparability and relevance of DAC statistics on development cooperation will meet informally this week. Civil society is calling for greater transparency when it comes to reporting debt relief as ODA.

Faced with the crisis of the century, the G20 has failed to meet the demands of the moment. As the Saudi Arabian presidency comes to a close, Eurodad policy experts take a critical look at what has been delivered.

Debt relief should not be reported as ODA. In the coming weeks, DAC members need to decide what is most important to them: allowing ODA double counting and inflation to create incentives to reward debt relief or upholding the credibility, integrity and solid reputation of DAC statistics.

The rules on how debt relief should be counted as Official Development Assistance are currently being negotiated by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Development Assistance Committee (DAC) – under the auspices of its Chair Susanna Moorehead – and the Paris Club, which is an informal group of creditor governments. 

The world is facing an unprecedented crisis. As Covid-19 spreads across the globe it threatens to disproportionately hit developing countries.

2020 starts the ten-year countdown for the successful implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. It is also a critical period for a just response to climate change, ensuring that those who are the least responsible do not pay the greatest price.

The new European Commission is sending a clear signal by tabling a “Green New Deal” within a month of its inception. But to be a true statement of intent rather than a mere public relations manoeuvre, it must speak to the urgency for action.  

Following the European elections in May, former German defence minister Ursula von der Leyen has assumed the role of President-elect of the European Commission. In July, von der Leyen, the first woman to take this post, released a concept paper titled “A Union that strives for more” and on Tuesday this week she unveiled the names of the new Commissioners.  And with these releases, the policy agenda of the next European Commission, mandated to govern until 2024, is slowly taking shape. In response, we ask what are the implications for development finance?   

As the promised leveraging effects of blended finance fail to materialise, the European Union is increasingly focussing on the policy environment in partner countries, based on an assumption that the problem must lie there. 

In this blog, Eurodad offers its take on the upcoming senior level meeting (SLM) of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC), a multi-stakeholder platform established to make sure all development actors deliver on their commitments to ensure development cooperation is really eradicating poverty and bringing about sustainable development. 

As G20 leaders meet this weekend to debate the state of the global financial and economic system, there is no shortage of problems to discuss. 

The United Nations convened in New York last week for the Financing for Development Forum. While the outcome document has been negotiated in advance, the Forum itself offered lots of opportunities to discuss what change we need to finance the sustainable development goals. 

The European Commission has released a new Staff Working Document on Policy Coherence for Development (PCD). The Commission’s report covers the first three years of the EU’s attempts to implement the Sustainable Development Goals, an endeavour for which PCD is crucial. The document however unveils that the EU’s PCD framework, as complex as it might already be, continues to have severe omissions – in particular the complete neglect of the EU’s fiscal and monetary policies on sustainable development in and outside the EU. Moreover, while the Communication maps EU policies on taxation and investment, it sells some of those as positive contributions while it neglects the risks and negative impacts that EU policies in these areas have.

When the global financial crisis broke, the world looked to the G20 to find solutions. But as G20 leaders recently gathered in Buenos Aires 10 years on for their 2018 Summit, it was all too clear that ‘too big to fail banks’ have grown even bigger while we’re stuck with a vastly expanded shadow banking industry and a very worrying new wave of debt crises. Even though the G20 consider themselves to be the world’s major body for economic policy coordination, they are sleepwalking into the next crisis.

Recent criticism of Chile’s ranking in the Doing Business Report (DBR) has once again put the report in the spotlight, with renewed calls for scrapping the highly controversial annual World Bank publication.

The first High Level Ministerial (HLM) of the Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC) ended on 16 April in Mexico City with mixed messages and a glut of new voluntary initiatives.