U.N. Dispatch: An Obscure Debate in the U.K. Over What Counts as ‘Foreign Aid’ Has Big Global Implications
Writer Joanne Lu discusses a debate raised by the U.K. at a recent meeting of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The issue at hand “is how the United Kingdom gets to count the aid it is spending on hurricane relief in some of its overseas territories. … [F]or now, the U.K., and the other 29 major donor countries, do not have a green light to count emergency spending in their own high-income territories toward their ODA targets, especially if it diverts funding from existing beneficiaries. But this topic clearly hasn’t been closed — nor should it be…” (11/9).