Guess Who's The World Leader In International Development? - Denmark

19 Nov 2013

While many rich countries can do better at helping share prosperity with developing countries, Denmark is ranked once again as the world leader at supporting global development.

According to the CGD’s (Center for Global Development) Commitment to Development Index (CDI), Denmark stands at the top. The Index gives scores to 27 countries according to their contributions to trade, aid, finance, environment, migration, technology transfer, security and investment in the developing countries.

Director for Europe and senior fellow of CGD, Owen Barder, who is responsible for preparing the CDI said that the global community has made repeated promises to seek better policies for the developing world. However, the data shows that so far the progress has been disappointing. The global community is discussing what kind of shared commitments to development it wants to set up after 2015, and they should include country-specific, quantified commitments on the part of rich countries to get their house in order.

All in all, the CGD found that the policies of rich countries are still doing little for the world’s poor and that particularly policies in OECD countries have not improved much in the eleven years that the CDI has been compiled.

However, Denmark was lauded for contributing a significant amount of finance and personnel to global humanitarian interventions and peacekeeping, giving a large quantity of foreign aid, promoting investment in developing countries, financial transparency and encouraging research and development.