What might Belgium’s Development Minister have meant when he argued that his country’s aid programme was ‘least bad’? Regular reviews of aid programmes produced by the Development Assistance Committee suggest that an important part of the answer lies in the overall administration of aid policy. When the DAC reviewed Belgium’s aid programme in 2001, it emphasized the implementation of ‘major legislative changes and sweeping administrative reforms’. Similarly, the central finding in its 2000 review of Italy’s policies was that ‘Considerable progress has been made in the management of Italian aid’.

Another important factor in evaluating an aid programme is the quality of the aid it disburses: the fewer strings are attached to particular aid flows, the higher the quality is generally deemed to be. This chapter analyses both the overall administration of the aid programmes in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands and Norway, as well as their performance on two key indicators of aid quality: tied aid and multilateral aid. Among others, this will help us decide the accuracy of Minister Outers’ assessment of his country’s programme.