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Value vs. number of records: Both the value of entries and the number of entries are necessary to provide a comprehensive picture of TRTA/CB. Investment projects are fewer in number but their large scale means they dominate the data by value. The number of records helps to bring out the importance of smaller-scale seminars or training courses that can be key to trade capacity building. A few donors could not provide financial data for all their activities. If such an activity is the only entry in a cell, the value will appear as $0.
Number of activities vs. number of records: Some donors split individual activities (workshop/project, etc.) to components to provide detailed data on aid allocated to each of the sub-categories of TRTA/CB. Others classified the whole activity under the most relevant sub-category. Some donors made a further breakdown of regional activities by splitting amounts between different beneficiary countries. Others simply reported such activities as "regional" or "global" projects and programmes. Thus for some donors the number of records in the cubes is larger than the "real" number of activities.
Data are for new commitments made in the year: A commitment is a firm obligation, expressed in writing and backed by the necessary funds, undertaken by an official donor to provide assistance for a specified purpose and under specified financial terms and conditions for the benefit of the recipient country or multilateral organisation. The data in the database cover grants and loans. The data cubes include all grants and concessional loans. Non-concessional loans (e.g. those from EBRD and IBRD) and self-financed activities (i.e. activities financed by a developing country for itself and implemented by a multilateral TA agency) are included in the database, but excluded from the cubes.
Time coverage: Data for 2001 to 2005 are complete. Data for 2006 and 2007 are partial and thus are not included in the data cubes.
Funding country/agency and implementing country/agency: Each record has a funding country/agency and an implementing country/agency. For most activities these are the same, but in some cases they are different. In particular, some agencies (e.g. ITC, UNCTAD, UNIDO) implement activities financed by various bilateral and multilateral donors. In consequence, some countries/agencies that did not provide data directly (including some developing countries) nevertheless appear as funders of TRTA/CB in the data cubes. The list of countries and agencies that reported data is given in the 2005 Joint Report (the 2006 Joint Report will be available soon).
TRTA/CB Trust Funds: To avoid double-counting, bilateral donors' contributions to multilateral organisations' TRTA/CB trust funds (e.g. JITAP, Integrated Framework, ITC and DDAGTF) are not included in the data cubes. Instead the individual activities financed through these trust funds are included. Individual contributions to these Trust Funds are available here.
Trade development - differences in methodology: A number of donors isolated the trade component of each activity, whereas others reported the whole activity marking it trade-related. Although some work to harmonise donors' approaches has been done, the total amounts of TRTA/CB per donor in this category should be interpreted with caution. Work on harmonization of donors’ reporting will continue in the future.
Income groups: Income groups shown in the data cubes are those as at 1st January 2005. Click here for the detailed list of income groups and all related information.
Multilateral agencies: see here for the list of acronyms.
For questions, please contact ann.gordon@oecd.org
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