Selecting countries for developmental aid programs using fuzzy PROMETHEE

Abstract

Wealthy nations continue to demonstrate their unwavering support to improving conditions and the general well-being of poor countries in spite of the recent economic crises. However, as developmental aid relatively shrinks, both Aid donors and recipient countries have shown keen interest in methodologies used in evaluating developmental assistance programs. Evaluation of aid programs is seen as a complex task mainly because of the several non-aid factors that tend to affect overall outcomes. Adding to the complexity are the subjective sets of criteria used in Aid evaluations programs. This paper proposes a fuzzy PROMETHEE framework to demonstrate how aid-recipient countries can be evaluated to deepen transparency, fairness, value for money and sustainability of such aid programs. Using the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) set of subjective criteria for evaluating aid programs; a numerical example pre-defined by linguistic terms parameterized by triangular fuzzy numbers is provided to evaluate aid programs. Fuzzy PROMETHEE is used to evaluate and rank countries for developmental aid programs. The fuzzy PROMETHEE method is particularly chosen because of the preference function approach in conducting pairwise comparison of alternatives involved in the selection process.