Aid dimension of the Commitment to Development Index: case study of the Czech Republic

The Commitment to Development Index (CDI) aims to assess rich countries' policies that affect sustainable development perspectives of poor countries and to rank rich countries from this perspective. The index consists of seven components and one of them - foreign aid - is explored in this paper. We describe the methodology of the aid component and apply it to the Czech Republic. Our results show that the aid policy of the Czech Republic, as measured by the aid component of the CDI, is relatively worse than that of most rich countries. However, this is not unexpected for a transition economy that has relatively recently changed its status from the recipient of foreign aid to that of a re-emerging donor. Both quantity and quality of aid are important for the overall development impact of the Czech Republic, though the data reveal that the main determinant of CDI aid scores are the aid volumes.