Chapter 3: Measuring the Effectiveness of Official Development Assistance on the Economic Growth of Developing Countries: A 2009–2013 Analysis

Aware of the great differences between the North and the South of the world, the international community has shown, since 1960s, an increasingly broader interest in international development cooperation: since 1960, when 17 new countries and former colonies joined the UN, the organization had to make room for unprecedented questions on its agenda (Caffarena, 2009). While in the immediate post-war period the focus was on the reconstruction of Europe, and the theme of international cooperation with the underdeveloped countries had been considered a marginal topic, as early as 1962, 36 developing countries met in an economic conference in Cairo, and, for the first time, the three blocks of Asia, Africa, and South America joined to make common demands. It was under the pressure of these countries that, one month later, the Economic and Social Council decided to convene a major international conference on trade and development issues. The conference opened in Geneva two years later, in 1964, and it was on this occasion that the “Group 77” was born. The group then grew to 132 members, with the will to coordinate the requests of the poorest nations toward the North of the world. When the conference ended it was transformed into a permanent structure that was a subsidiary organ of the General Assembly: the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The UNCTAD proved ineffective with respect to the results it concretely obtained, but its creation represented the beginning of the Third World countries’ awareness of the global problems of development and the responsibility of the Western countries’ political and economic policies for many of the difficulties they were facing. From this historical moment, we can say that the Official Development Assistance (ODA) has had a notable boost (Polsi, 2006).