Economic crisis to cut aid flow to Philippines

The world economic crisis is expected to slow down the flow of aid in the next few years, with the Philippines expected to be among the most affected, a recent United Nations report showed.

According to “The Global Partnership for Development: Making Rhetoric a Reality,” a stagnation in country programmable aid (CPA) could happen from 2013 to 2015, reflecting the delayed impact of the global economic crisis on the budgets of donor countries.

CPA is defined in the report as a core subset of official development assistance (ODA) that applies to programs and projects and excludes non-programmable items such as humanitarian aid and debt relief.

“Countries in Central America and several large recipients in Eastern Asia, such as Indonesia and the Philippines, are expected to see the largest declines in country programmable aid,” the UN said.

For the first time in many years, the volume of ODA fell in 2011, declining almost 3 percent due to fiscal restraints of donor countries, the report said.

The report was prepared by the MDG [Millennium Development Goals] Gap Task Force formed by the secretary general of the United Nations in 2007 to improve the monitoring of commitments in MDG 8, the global partnership for development.

ODA is one of the indicators for MDG 8. Other indicators are market access and debt sustainability.

“The message of the present report, however, is a more sobering one: the Task Force has had difficulty identifying areas of significant new progress and for the first time there are signs of backsliding,” the report said.

It warned that with no apparent commitment by donor governments to reverse the trend, fewer MDGs would be reached by the 2015 deadline.

The report cited a study saying countries such as Egypt, Philippines, South Africa, Tunisia and Uzbekistan could feasibly fund their respective MDG strategy by hiking domestic tax revenues.

The MDGs are development targets committed by international governments on poverty reduction, education, gender equality, child mortality reduction, maternal health, environmental stability, HIV/AIDS reduction and global partnership for development. –Ana G. Roa, Philippine Daily Inquirer