Quality and Coordination of Official Development Aid in Pakistan

Pakistan has historically received large volumes of aid but it has also faced an increasingly difficult task of aid coordination. In 2007, Pakistan received more than U.S.$2.2 billion in Official Development Assistance (ODA), ranking the country as the sixth largest recipient of official aid in the world. This overall sum, however, came from diverse sources in an erratic fashion and was being spent on many different activities, often through a combination of budgetary and non-budgetary arrangements, thus leading to a complex task of coordination. This study investigates these various aspects of aid composition, fragmentation, and volatility as key measures of aid quality and discusses their implication for the coordination and effectiveness of aid.[Working Paper No.11]