On Assessing a Gift Horse: The Evaluation of Foreign Aid by Recipients.

Robert Klitgaard

Expert InsightsPublished 1973

A policy paper to help Peru's Instituto Nacional de Planificacion (INP) reorient its two-year-old program for monitoring and evaluating technical assistance projects. Such aid comes in diverse forms from many donors to many recipients. Klitgaard, who helped design the INP evaluation system, discusses the conceptual issues, the history, and the barriers to full implementation. Analytic resources for sophisticated cost/benefit analysis were not available. The system adopted therefore called for INP to check each proposal for consistency with national plans and for measurable benefits. (Sample forms are appended.) In March 1973, Klitgaard found the project application and authorization process flourishing, but the rest of the system not implemented. There were no comprehensive project files, no interproject comparisons, no semiannual or final reports. Evidently INP gained much by its power to reject proposals, whereas final reports and interproject comparisons would have led to bureaucratically dangerous interministerial comparisons. The remedy lies in changed attitudes rather than more centralization or new techniques. 59 pp. Bibliog.

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Klitgaard, Robert, On Assessing a Gift Horse: The Evaluation of Foreign Aid by Recipients. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1973. https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P5040.html.
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