Aid for Trade: Making It Effective

Aid for Trade is not a new concept but concerted efforts are needed to ensure that multilateral trade liberalisation has an effective impact on pro-poor growth. For too many WTO members, market access improvement - without support to strengthen trade capacity - brings little benefit. Money, however, is not the central issue. The problem seems to lie in the poor value for money of Aid for Trade programmes, as highlighted by most Aid for Trade evaluations. In fact, the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness is far from being systematically applied in these programmes, particularly in regards to country ownership and results-based management. The key value added the WTO can bring to Aid for Trade is a step change in its effectiveness. Consequently, based on its coherence mandate, the WTO should play a key role in providing the necessary political incentives to increase effectiveness. It should strengthen the scrutiny, monitoring and surveillance at a global level and thus encourage better local accountability mechanisms. The DAC has an important contribution to make to these mechanisms.