How to Take into Account Vulnerability in Aid Allocation Criteria and Lack of Human Capital as Well: Improving the Performance Based Allocation

This paper considers why and how the Performance Based Allocation (PBA) used in multilateral development banks and in particular at IDA, could be improved by taking the structural handicaps of eligible countries into account. The PBA relies on a debatable definition of performance. It does not meet the equity concern raised by the existence of structural handicaps to growth. It neglects the lessons of the aid effectiveness literature. Finally, it suffers from some opacity. We show how it is possible to increase the share of specific groups of countries, such as Sub-Saharan Africa or post-conflict states, in a transparent manner.