 The organisers asked me to talk about aid and fragile states. This is joint work with Patricia Giustino here at UNU wider. We were approached by Shanta Devarajan, Raj Desai and Jennifer Tobin who are editing a book for Elgar on, it's a new handbook on aid and development. It's a rather broad topic and Patricia and I were asked to comment on aid and fragility. So of course there's a really big aid literature. I mean if you Google this, this is like, you know, thousands and thousands. And you know, you can take your pick, does aid help growth and development? I'm aware it's not quite the same thing, but so is aid effective? Some people say yes, some people say no, well and then you know, maybe a little bit. So fundamentally I think Lord Peter Bowell already in the 1970s sort of said aid is going to be least effective in the places that most need it. And I think we should keep this in mind. Then there is a sort of literature on pathways out of fragility and we already heard one of the sort of main proponents here in this literature, Severine Auticea on this morning's panel. But there's also Page Fortner and Barbara Walter who sort of have written very much about you know, how do we, how do we, how do we arrive at a stable peace and manage this peace then? And then within this big aid literature there's something on aid and peace or aid and war. Let's start maybe what comes before peace, so it's the war. So does more aid give you a higher risk of experiencing a war? Once the war is ongoing, does aid help you to bring it to an end or does aid help to sustain it? And once the peace is there, can it actually help to maintain the peace? And so quite a few people have written on this and I've also contributed to this literature. And then there's the aid and governance literature. So this is much more of a bottom-up approach of sort of looking at community-driven development, so these sort of CDDs, programs where local communities for example in the DRC can decide what they want to prioritise and how development aid is being spent. Evidence here is mixed. I'm not the big expert on this literature, but Patricia is, so Patricia is much more looking at the micro, so this sort of aid and governance bubble that I've put up there is much more of a micro literature and the aid and peace is much more of a macro literature. In the aid and governance we also have some studies on how cash transfers might help you to increase social cohesion, so Chris Blatman has sort of written quite a bit about this. And yeah, there's some evidence maybe that this might help. But these literatures are actually really quite small and you immediately understand that it's difficult to research these topics on a micro level in situations that we might call peace, but don't really feel all that peaceful on the ground very often. Okay, so aid and fragility is going to be just this sort of overlap of this aid literature and pathways out of fragility. And it really, there isn't as much literature as I would like it to be. This being a stock taking exercise for our handbook, we sort of then also have to think, what do we, how do we define fragility? And I think the LSE Oxford Commission on Fragility was very useful in sort of clarifying my mind what we understand by fragility. Maybe you want to just stick in your mind with a very simple definition of fragility or fragile state is not capable of providing what Eric was just talking about, the means of lifting yourself out of poverty. So that's number one, that's, and the other one is security. So you don't have prosperity and you don't have peace, that's fragility. But maybe let's look at how the LSE Oxford Commission sort of defined it. So this was a bunch of economists, really, yeah, big names. Tim Bezley, Paul Collier. But they started off with, okay, there are some opposing groups in societies that don't get on. And at least one of these groups questions the legitimacy of the state. And that makes it very difficult to build state capacity, so people don't want tax, you don't have to buy into the state project. This obviously leads to very poor economic performance, because if the state isn't providing their necessary framework, we get poor economic performance, a very narrow private sector. So it really ties in what Eric was just talking about. And these economists are very susceptible to shocks and they're not very resilient. So Tony Killick wrote a book about this at least 15 years ago. And all of these sort of five characteristics make up the fragility syndrome. This is what the committee told it, named it. So that's the concept, but how do you measure it? So there's the fragile states index, there's the state fragility index. I always get confused about the sort of FSI and the SFI. And then the OECD also has a sort of states of fragility reports, where they've also defined fragility. There are advantages and disadvantages of using these different indices. The two top ones actually score everything from Somalia to Sweden. The OEC doesn't, it's only for eight recipients. And it's, of course, it's a continuum. Where exactly are you going to cut it off for your work? What do you call a fragile state and on what isn't? But when you look at these different definitions, I just did this, we did this for 2018. We've got, out of the top 15 for these three different indices, we've got 10 countries that are the same, said Somalia, South Sudan. I mean, these are sort of countries you'd expect to be there at the sad bottom end. And since I get always confused with FSI and SFI, we sort of decided we use the OECD definition because it was also very useful for this paper, because we're only interested in aid and fragility and because the OECD focuses on aid recipients, that seemed a good choice. So what do we actually see in terms of aid allocation to different kinds of countries? So these extremely fragile ones are the yellow ones. So the bars are 100%. It's over time, over the last five years for which we could have data. And so how much of the aid goes to these extremely fragile ones? Well, about 25%. And the other three quarters go to fragile states and non-fragile states. And how much is it? So this was just a percentage, but these sort of bars, the yellow bars get a little bit bigger over time. So we have got more money flowing to extremely fragile states. And that is sort of detrimental for the other fragile states, but not much is really happening in terms of the non-fragile states, which are the dark bars. So maybe a different way of looking at it is, we're looking at different rows here. The extremely fragile ones are on the top of the table. How many recipients are there? So there are 16 extremely fragile ones. Fragile ones are 50 and non-fragile 81. So that maybe is also important to keep in mind where this money goes. How many donors do these countries have? So I've got a number and then the slash and another number. So the first number tells you how many bilateral donors do these countries have and how many multilateral donors after the dash. And you can say that the only purpose of this column is to sort of say fragile countries have a lot more donors. And also when you look at the minimum number of donors, they have to cope with a lot of donors. And this is completely opposed to the Paris Declaration in 2005 where we sort of said this donor proliferation is really difficult for these poor countries to, they haven't got the resources to deal with the Danish delegation and Canadian one and then the World Bank and so on. It ties up too many resources for them. So this is still, this is 10 years and more after the Paris Declaration and there's no improvement really. So per capita, that's the next column. ODA per capita is higher in extremely fragile countries. Also keep in mind some of them really quite small, population-wise. Then ODA, that's the last column as a percentage of GDP. If you do it for GNI is very similar. Extremely fragile countries on average have 13% of their GDP. And there's some work that sort of suggests that there's a threshold after which additional aid is not as effective any longer. You get diminishing returns like everything in life and then if you're sort of going over roughly 15%, this is problematic. Quite a few countries, if the average is 13, you get quite a few countries that are over this threshold. These poor countries haven't got the absorptive capacity to deal with it. So too much aid, we had a question earlier, too much peace, too much aid can also be a problematic thing. So now I'm going to show you two graphs where I'm going to compare age to fragile states. Bilateral, that's the bilaterals, yeah. And this is the multilateral. So the multilaterals give less to the dark ones, the non-fragile ones. A lot more to that intermediate category, the fragile ones, but less to the extremely fragile countries. What do other donors do? So it's the same system again with my graphs here. To the left is China. Note that we haven't got as many bars for China because Chinese aid data are still, we've had big improvements here, but we still don't know as much about Chinese aid as for DAC or multilateral aid. So you can see clearly that China is not giving as much aid to extremely fragile countries. The right panel shows you the other non-DAC important donors. And who are the important non-DAC donors? This is Kuwait, Turkey and the United Arab Emirates. And you can sort of see towards the end in 2019, you get a lot of aid, so the yellow becomes really big. So there's a lot of money to fragile states. What is this? This is basically Turkey's aid for Syrian refugees because Turkey hosts so many Syrian refugees and that comes under aid here. So if we then sort of think about aid by sector, so I told you, you know, sort of gave you an overview, where does aid go? So is there difference in terms of sectors? So the first panel gives you the sort of different, you know, how much aid the bar tells you, how much aid goes to extremely fragile states. And the next one is for fragile and the next one is for non-fragile states. And the fragile and non-fragile look very similar here, but the extremely fragile looks different. So there's this blue bar and that's humanitarian aid. You'd expect that, yeah? So these extremely fragile countries lead a lot of humanitarian aid and they've got a small yellow, very yellow bar which is social infrastructure. So if I now look, peel back one more layer on sort of say within social infrastructure, we've got government and civil society. And so what do donors do here? Here you see very little difference between extremely fragile and fragile states. So you have, yeah, hardly a difference here. And then conflict, peace and security, the very purpose for which we are sort of meeting here at this conference, we consider to see that yes, extremely fragile countries are getting more for civilian peace building. So the conclusions are that fragile countries face large development needs, but are least likely to use aid effectively. The donor proliferation, and I didn't talk about this, but aid volatility is particularly problematic for these countries. The aid spending patterns to fragile and non-fragile countries are quite often similar. The last couple of bar charts I showed you, even though they are likely to have very different needs. So I think donors need to sort of reconsider this. But however, extremely fragile countries receive more humanitarian and peace building aid. So I could show you that. That wasn't always the case. This is a more recent development, so that's very positive. But the evidence on aid improving peace and governance is very mixed, and we definitely need much more research in this area. Thank you for your attention.