https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/unkept-promises-western-aid
"As Western donors skimp on development aid, China, which is not a member of the OECD, has become a major provider of loans for public infrastructure in poor countries. In some developing countries, Chinese loans have eclipsed traditional Western aid and given China a political and diplomatic advantage.
Western donors have also agreed to other accounting schemes: counting unused vaccine donations (sometimes recorded above their actual cost); overstating the grant (or aid) element of subsidized loans to low-income countries; and counting the full cost of any debt relief when much of that total had already been reflected in higher borrowing costs paid by high-risk borrowers when the loan was issued. In addition, the donors are currently considering adding to their aid totals the value of any reallocation to developing countries of their recently acquired additional Special Drawing Rights; Special Drawing Rights are a reserve asset issued by the International Monetary Fund from time to time to bolster central banks’ foreign currency reserves. Advanced economies have no need of these additional reserves, and are considering reallocating some of them to developing countries or to special funds that could be set up at the IMF or at the multilateral development banks. Yes, such reallocations make eminent sense and would shore up market confidence in countries suffering pandemic-related debt distress and coping with the high import costs of food and energy because of the war in Ukraine. But counting such reallocations as aid is disingenuous since they carry no real fiscal cost.
Cooking the books in these ways has allowed wealthy countries in recent years to inflate their claims about how much aid they provide without increasing the amount of money they actually disburse. This year, the effect of this clever accounting is more pronounced than ever. Countries that are traditionally among the top aid donors as a proportion of their GDP, including Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, have cut back aid for poor countries to fund the costs of hosting refugees; but they can still report to the Development Assistance Committee and to voters at home that their overall aid spending has not declined at all. Samantha Power, the head of USAID, drew attention to this problem in July in a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies: “Unfortunately, today, when the needs are greatest, assistance budgets are either stagnating or they are being cut,” she said. “And some countries are rewriting the rules on what counts as development spending, to shield themselves from criticism as they cut funding.”
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Western countries are not just inflating their development-aid commitments; they are also actively falling short in many areas. The unfulfilled promise Western countries made in 2009 to provide at least $100 billion per year in climate finance to developing countries is further undermining their credibility. The failure of donors, especially of the United States and the U.S.-led World Bank, to contribute sufficiently to this effort has become an embarrassment. And as with development aid, a range of third-party assessments have found that the funding claims of donors have widely exaggerated the transfers that have taken place.
Climate change is the biggest risk to the future of humanity. Industrialized nations have and are causing climate change with their emissions, while lower income countries are the most vulnerable and will suffer most of the damages, even though they have barely contributed to the crisis."
