POLÍTICAS CONTABLES Y CRITERIOS DE VALORACIÓN APLICADOS

As discussed in Section 3.1.1, the indicators for development policy activity are based on the levels of Official Development Assistance (ODA) going to Latin America, as reported in the OECD’s statistics database. This makes cross- country comparison relatively easy. The external yardstick against which activ- ity is measured is constituted by the other DAC members (the relevant detailed ODA figures are shown in Appendix B). Given this data availability, I again employ the “Direct Method of Calibration”, as with the numerical trade and investment indicators. The cutoff-points for full set membership, the crossover point and full nonmembership are based on careful inspection of the data, as described in Section 3.2.2.1. The indicators and their cutoff-points are specified as follows:

1. Country percentage of total DAC ODA to the Americas, 2007-9 average. This indicator represents the level of activity vis-à-vis other donors.

• Cutoff-points: 15% (full membership), 7% (crossover point), and 1% (full nonmembership). The cutoff-points are based on steps in the data pointing to qualitative differences; cf. also Figure 3.1 (page 96). 2. Percentage of ODA to Latin America out of total national ODA, 2007- 9 average. The external yardstick is provided by the other DAC mem- bers. This indicator represents the level of development policy activity towards Latin America in comparison to other regions.

• Cutoff-points: 20% (full membership), 7.93% (crossover point; per- centage of total DAC ODA going to the Americas), and 0.1% (full nonmembership).

3. Number of Latin American countries/regions among top-25 ODA recipi- ents, 2007-9 average, compared to the other DAC members and the DAC average. This indicator demonstrates the importance of Latin America among the top recipients of ODA from the three donor countries under scrutiny.

• Cutoff-points: 12.5 (full membership; more than half the countries in the top-25 are in Latin America), 2.47 (crossover point; 2007-9 overall DAC average), and 0 (full nonmembership).

In order to obtain one value for each country, the membership scores from each indicator are intersected using the logical AND operator, as discussed in Sec- tion 3.2.2.2. This applies strict criteria for full set membership, as a country

would have to score highly on all three indicators to obtain a high member- ship score for the set of countries with very high development policy activity towards Latin America. The results are summarised in Table 3.5.

Table 3.5: fsQCA scores for Quantitative Evidence on Development Policy

Activity towards Latin America

Country Indicator fsQCA Score Intersected score

(1) 0.07 Britain (2) 0.08 0.05 (3) 0.05 (1) 0.74 Germany (2) 0.55 0.36 (3) 0.36 (1) 0.98 Spain (2) 0.99 0.9 (3) 0.9

The results in Table 3.5 show that in the field of development policy, Spain is highly active, achieving full or almost full membership on all three dimen- sions. It is, in fact, the second largest DAC donor after the US. British devel- opment policy activity vis-à-vis Latin America, on the other hand, is very low. It is important to note in this context that the UK has shut down its bilateral development policy programme with Latin America. The only Latin American country DFID currently works with in Latin America is Brazil within the emer- ging markets context – it has no programme within the country (DFID 2011). This result is therefore not at all surprising, but the question of why the UK op- erates such a low-key development policy vis-à-vis Latin America poses some questions. Is it because the UK does not have substantial economic or political interests in Latin America? Or because Latin America is relatively rich in com- parison to other developing regions, especially sub-Saharan Africa, and does not ‘need’ development assistance any more? While this result may be consist- ent with the liberal-utilitarian explanation, competing explanations drawing on the influence of domestic or international norms, as well as rational adapt- ation to international rules – as outlined in Chapter 2 – might also wield ex- planatory power. Chapter 5 will thus disaggregate the motivations for giving aid to Latin America further in order to shed light on these questions. These issues also feed directly into the observations on Germany: if Latin America does not ‘need’ development assistance, why does Germany continue with its programme? Because as Table 3.5 shows, Germany’s policy activity is consid- erably higher than the UK’s. It remains at the lower end, but Germany scores rather highly on indicator (1), i.e. policy activity towards Latin America in

comparison to the other DAC donors. Germany accounts for 11.5% of total DAC ODA to the Americas region in the 2007-9 average, making it the third most important DAC donor behind the US (25.8%) and Spain (23.0%). Thus, Germany is an important donor for Latin America, but Latin America is not a very important recipient for Germany. This potential loss of fine-grained dif- ferentiation has been discussed in Section 3.2.2.2. It is important not to lose sight of such variation in the indexing process. However, since the process is laid out step by step, the researcher can always go back and identify instances of interesting variation for further scrutiny. The variation does not simply ‘dis- appear’ during aggregation, but remains tractable.

Indeed, on the basis of the variation discovered in this step of the index- ing procedure, I choose development policy as one of this investigation’s case studies in order to ascertain policy makers’ motivations in carrying out such widely disparate development policies towards one and the same region. In the next step, the results so far are integrated in order to generate one single score per country for the economic dimension.