The Politics of Aid Selectivity ─ Good Governance Criteria in World Bank, U.S. and Dutch Development Assistance

The first extended analysis of selectivity policies of important bilateral and multilateral aid donors, this book combines a policy-analytical with a quantitative-empirical approach.

Bringing out the conflicts that may exist between foreign assistance agendas and the desire of governments in developing countries to set priorities for their national development policies, the author:

• describes in detail the policies of aid selectivity adopted by the World Bank, the Netherlands and the United States since the end of the 1990s including the underlying assumptions
• looks at key decisions related to a selection of developing countries
• compares policy-making and different approaches to selectivity in the United Kingdom with those in developing countries.

Critical and analytical in style, this book is, among other areas, an invaluable resource for students of various sub-fields of development studies and policy analysis as well as appealing to researchers and policy makers working in the area of foreign assistance across the globe.

Wil Hout is an Associate Professor of World Development at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague (The Netherlands) and currently serves as Dean of the Institute. He is the author of Capitalism and the Third World, co-editor (with Jean Grugel) of Regionalism Across the North-South Divide and co-editor of three Dutch-language volumes on issues of international relations and political science.