The influence of official development assistance on economical development of the selected groups of developing countries around the world
No 1/2009, September
Abstract
The current financial crisis influenced the whole economy around the world. Almost all sectors of human activities and all countries are affected by its impacts. While in the past all kinds of crises had an effect on developing countries and in case of developed countries only selected sectors of the national economy were involved, the current crisis, which started in the second half of 2008, seriously affected not only developing countries but also developed countries. During the last several decades, we became witnesses of a permanently increasing gap between developing and developed countries. While only few developed countries with about 1.2 billion people produced about 80 % of the world GDP, the rest of the world represented by developing countries with about 5.8 billion people produced only 20 % of the world GDP. Many different ideas were proposed to improve the situation in case of developing countries and to eliminate the gap between the rich “North” and the poor “South”. All initiatives are based on a cooperation between developed and developing countries. This cooperation is based not only on the economical and political cooperation, but also on a very intensive developing aid provided by developed countries and international institutions. The aid is offered in many forms (financial, food or development aid). The main aim of our paper is to evaluate the value and flows of possible forms of aid which were offered to developing countries in the period before the financial crisis and the next step is to estimate how the current financial crisis affects developing aid flows.
Keywords
Aid, development assistance, economic growth, developing countries