World pledges billions for Afghan transition
A major donors’ conference for Afghanistan wrapped up this weekend in Tokyo. All told, participants pledged $16 billion to help the Afghan government operate and to boost development in the country: The Participants reiterate that the Afghan Government will have special, significant, and continuing but declining fiscal requirements that cannot be met by domestic revenues ...
A major donors' conference for Afghanistan wrapped up this weekend in Tokyo. All told, participants pledged $16 billion to help the Afghan government operate and to boost development in the country:
A major donors’ conference for Afghanistan wrapped up this weekend in Tokyo. All told, participants pledged $16 billion to help the Afghan government operate and to boost development in the country:
The Participants reiterate that the Afghan Government will have special, significant, and continuing but declining fiscal requirements that cannot be met by domestic revenues in the years following Transition as has been estimated by the World Bank and the Afghan Government in preparation for the Tokyo Conference. To help address the budget shortfall, the International Community commits to directing financial support towards Afghanistan’s economic development through the Transformation Decade….the International Community commits to providing over 16 billion US dollars through 2015, and sustaining support, through 2017, at or near levels of the past decade to respond to the fiscal gap as estimated by the World Bank and the Afghan Government.
The conference’s outcome document sets an array of different goals for the Afghan government to meet, some quite specific. In the multilateral realm, it calls on the Afghan government to complete its program with the International Monetary Fund, to negotiate accession to the World Trade Organization by 2014, and to improve private-sector openness, as measured by the World Bank’s Doing Business Report.
It appears that responsibility for monitoring Afghanistan’s compliance will be largely in the hands of individual donor states. Via Reuters:
According to "mutual accountability" provisions in the final conference documents, as much as 20 percent of the aid could ultimately depend on Afghanistan meeting benchmarks on fighting corruption and other good governance measures.
However, a Japanese official said that it was up to each donor whether to make its aid contingent on such reforms and that the benchmarks could vary from country to country.
World Bank Managing Director Sri Mulyani Indrawati said the pressure was on the Afghan government to deliver reforms and ensure fair elections in 2014 in order to secure aid beyond the amount pledged in Tokyo.
David Bosco is a professor at Indiana University’s Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies. He is the author of The Poseidon Project: The Struggle to Govern the World’s Oceans. Twitter: @multilateralist
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