The OECD: A Classic Sunset Organisation

Yes, there was a time when the OECD was proud to have been described as ‘The Rich Man’s Club’. This probably coincided with the zeitgeist of the ‘Greed is Good’ era, captured so well in the famous Wall Street movie. Of course, no OECD official would have admitted that his or her work was to be the defender of the rich. But during three decades of interaction with OECD representatives, I constantly sensed that they viewed with condescension all the views expressed by ‘Third World’ representatives. They were confident that they were the real custodians of the ‘holy grail’ of economic development. This arrogance and condescension would have been understandable if the ‘Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’ had developed a sterling record of promoting either economic cooperation or development. Sadly, the OECD has never fulfilled the mission suggested by its name. Its predecessor, the OEEC, as documented by Clifton and Diaz-Fuentes, may have fulfilled its role of managing and implementing the Marshall Plan for Europe. But the OECD has no success story to speak of. Clifton and Diaz-Fuentes have done the OECD and the world a favour by documenting what the organisation has and has not achieved. They describe well the historical context in which the role of the OECD evolved. As they write, ‘Contemporary scholars understood that the purpose of the OECD was to help consolidate the transatlantic military and economic alliance between North America and Europe in a context of the Cold War and of increased interdependence’ (p. 303). But the Cold War ended over 20 years ago. The OECD should have reinvented itself to stay relevant. It failed to do so and thereby confirmed that it was destined to become a ‘sunset organisation’. The tragedy here is that the OECD could have played a valuable role globally. Each year, the OECD countries dispense billions of dollars in aid. If these billions of dollars had been well spent, billions of people could have been rescued from poverty. Instead, most official development assistance (ODA) was wasted. Countries like Tanzania and Zambia, which received more aid per capita than most countries, had little to show for it. What happened? Why did billions of dollars fail to foster economic cooperation and development? Institutionally there was no better global organisation than the OECD to solve this mystery. But it failed. Clifton and Diaz-Fuentes explain the institutional factors that prevented the OECD from providing independent and objective analysis. It was funded by donor countries. It was also staffed by donor countries. Indeed, as the article documents, for a long time, three countries, France, the US and the UK, provided most of the staff. No organisation bites the hand that feeds it. Hence, instead of reviewing objectively the failures of the donor countries, OECD officials assumed that all the flaws were the fault of the recipient countries. The following telling line from the Clifton ⁄Diaz-Fuentes article captures well the attitudes of the OECD analysts: ‘OECD reports on nonmembers took the form of ‘‘unidirectional’’ recommendations, since it was assumed that its members and staff enjoyed superior policy ‘‘know-how’’ based on the assumption of the superior functioning of their economies’(p. 305). In short, despite its name and ostensible mission, the role of the OECD was not to serve the interests of aid recipient countries. This is why it kept its deliberations as secret as possible. As Clifton and Diaz-Fuentes write,