During the transition process in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), the post-socialist countries received much support from Western high developed countries in order to improve the effectiveness of their public administrationand to adapt it to the demands given by the EU. Similar as it was with foreign aid for Latin American, African and Asian countries before, this support was, to say the least, not always effective. The question this paper addresses is how to understand such failures. To answer that question we reviewed the literature on the subject of foreign aid. In that literature an increasing radicalism about foreign aid, based on dubious assumptions, is observed. These assumptions are that the quantity of aid as such makes a difference, that nobody in the aid business cares, that optimizing the input, process and output in organizational and managerial terms will almost automatically improve effectiveness, and that there exists a coherent aid industry.
This paper explicates the assumptions, and treats them as hypotheses. The conclusion, based on research into the aid given to CEE-countries during their transition process, is that the hypotheses have to be refuted. The assumptions underlying the debate about foreign aid are one-sided and false
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