Development Assistance Committee

The listed Participants at this time are: Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Kuwait, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

[3] Known at first as the Development Assistance Group (DAG), the committee was set up on 13 January 1960 under the auspices of the OECD's forerunner, the Organisation for European Economic Co-operation (OEEC).

[1] A primary concern of the DAG, addressed at its second (July 1960) and third (October 1960) meetings, was to achieve accurate and comparable data reporting by its members on their aid flows to developing countries.

In March 1961, the OEEC published the first comprehensive survey of The Flow of Financial Resources to Countries in Course of Economic Development, 1956-59.

[1] On 23 July 1961 [4] a Ministerial Resolution decreed that upon the supersession of the OEEC by the OECD, the DAG would become the DAC, and these changes came about in September 1961.

The resolution also spelled out the DAC's mandate in five points, the first of which read: The Committee will continue to consult on the methods for making national resources available for assisting countries and areas in the process of economic development and for expanding and improving the flow of long-term funds and other development assistance to them.The origins of the so-called "DAC Secretariat" or DCD are as follows.

A Development Department (DD), under the direction of Assistant Secretary-General Luciano Giretti of Italy was established within the OECD Secretariat in 1961.

Later the rest of the member states followed, either establishing an aid agency under the command of its Foreign ministry or as a separate entity.

One of the principal questions that has emerged over the years was how to ensure that its member states contributed equal shares of development aid.

[9] The issue of the aid burden-sharing eventually led to the first report on "Total Official Contributions as Per Cent of National Income" in 1967, something that was accompanied by closely negotiated explanations.

[7] A 2009 independent evaluation of DAC members' policies and practices towards untying by the Danish Institute for International Studies concluded that on the basis of the available information, the overall picture was positive.

At the DAC High Level Meeting in April 2005, participants adopted the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness.

[14] The International Health Partnership (IHP+) was created in 2007 in order to put the Paris and Accra principles on aid effectiveness into practice.

In April 2014, the Global Partnership -- for which the OECD and UNDP assure a joint support team -- held its first High Level Meeting in Mexico City.

The Index quantifies a wide range of policies on seven indicators: aid, trade, investment, migration, environment, security, and technology.

Because of this and because some formerly poor East Asian countries were now middle-income, the DAC in 1993 divided the list of recipients into two parts, on the basis of national income.

Aid to countries in the upper income part was put into a new category called Official Assistance (OA), separate from ODA.

Movement of countries on or off the list has caused the DAC to retroactively change past ODA figures for some group categories.