Appendix to the Post: Do Poor People and The Poorest Countries Receive The Most Aid?

There are two ways to group countries by their GNI per capita. The one followed by the post Do Poor People and The Poorest Countries Receive The Most Aid tracks a group of countries based on their current per capita GNI. For instance, countries which currently fit the criteria for the middle income category are tracked over time, even though some of these may have been richer or poorer through the time period of analysis. Obviously this is limited in that, going back over time, these countries may have actually been low, not middle, income countries.

Alternatively, one can set GNI per capita brackets for various groups and allow countries to fall within these groups based on those income brackets. So, throughout the time period of analysis, a country can start as a low income, move to lower middle income, and end up as an upper middle income. This is the approach followed here.

Figures 1′, 2′, and 3′ are a reproduction of Figures 1, 2, and 3 in the post Do poor people and the poorest countries receive the most aid, respectively. These figures produce much stronger results against the claim that ODA doesn’t get allocated towards the poorest countries. Unfortunately, figures 4 and 5 are hard to reproduce using this method because complications arising from the availability of poverty data.

Data Sources:

All the data are from WDI.