You should be afraid, just not of what you were afraid of at first...
Amidst the brouhaha over the Lancet article on aid fungibility, there’s one underlying question that seems not to have been addressed explicitly: what is the basis on which we expect funding (aid and domestic resources) to be allocated? I work in this field, and this basic problem has only been addressed with any quality in one place.
The comment on this topic is of sharply variable quality. Most of the voices critical of this evident of ‘fungibility’ deserve to be dismissed out of hand. Many suggest that by reducing own-funding to health the Governments concerned are committing a grave sin, based on absolutely no evidence on what the marginal return of the money moved was in the health sector compared to other sectors. These are single issue activists who lack the will or capacity to think more broadly than their specialism, and as Owen Barder has said, we should scorn them. Two contributions raise specific issues about resource allocation that we should explore further.
Not surprisingly, Owen’s is one of them, and his is the only contribution I would class as unreservedly useful, indeed excellent. He makes the most important point that we must hold in mind: the Lancet article actually does not address fungibility of aid. Aid would be fungible if the exact aid dollars that were earmarked for health could be used for education, transport or even private jets. What the Lancet article shows is that aid money in a sector can free up resources that the Government was always able to spend anywhere it wanted in a new area. That money was already fungible – it has simply been moved from one place to another in response to non-fungible funds. This is of crucial importance to this debate, because it means we can dismiss the question of fungibility altogether. What we are really talking about is resource allocation procedures governing the always-fungible Government resources.
Laura Freschi at Aid Watch makes the other contribution we should pay attention to, though I’m not uncritical of it. She says that donors use project support and earmarked funding to try and ‘force’ recipient Governments to use their resources ‘well’ by which she means ‘as the donors think they should’. This assumes that Governments will not change their own fungible resource allocation after the introduction of new, non-fungible resources by donors, so all aid money is purely additional to the sector it appears in. She says that if it doesn’t do this, then the argument for using earmarked funds disappears. This contribution is important, because it now introduces into the discussion the intentions of donor resource allocation and structure decisions, though I argue below this is an incomplete understanding of how it actually works.
So, how should resources for development be allocated, and how does the reality depart from this norm? Ideally, our resource allocation procedure would be entirely rational. Imagine a world in which no distinction is made between aid and local funds, and all money is fungible, the resource allocation procedure of Government should be straightforward. Looking at all the funds the Government has, it allocates a certain amount to core running costs (salaries, electricity bills and such) and then distributes the balance based on an analysis of the key constraints to the development of the country. If they have problems in health, education, infrastructure and private sector development, the rational resource allocation procedure would then address the constraining factors in each area. Given resources are scarce, we allocate them by looking at where the marginal benefit of each dollar is highest. If after we’ve spent $20 in health, we find that the marginal benefit in education is higher, we switch our attention there, and so on.
What we don’t do is just pour money in one sector until all the problems it faces disappear: doing this is counterintuitive, since after a point, each dollar would have a bigger impact in a different sector.
