Aid effectiveness is the degree of success or failure of international aid (development aid or humanitarian aid). Concern with aid effectiveness might be at a high level of generality (whether aid on average fulfils the main functions that aid is supposed to have), or it might be more detailed (considering relative degrees of success between different types of aid in differing circumstances).
Questions of aid effectiveness have been highly contested by academics, commentators and practitioners: there is a large literature on the subject. Econometric studies in the late 20th century often found the average effectiveness of aid to be minimal or even negative. Such studies have appeared on the whole to yield more affirmative results in the early 21st century, but the picture is complex and far from clear in many respects.
Many prescriptions have been made about how to improve aid effectiveness. In 2003–2011 there existed a global movement in the name of aid effectiveness, around four high level forums on aid effectiveness. These elaborated a set of good practices concerning aid administration co-ordination and relations between donors and recipient countries. The Paris Declaration and other results of these forums embodied a broad consensus on what needed to be done to produce better development results.[1] From 2011 this movement was subsumed in one concerned more broadly with effective development co-operation, largely embodied by the Global Partnership for Effective Development Co-operation.