Reply #2: The US might score higher with different weightings.

[Igel]

Or it could score lower. As with most ratings, you really have to look at what the nice neat number that pops out at the end of the sausage machine means. Is it dollars spent? Pounds of wheat delivered? Number of people helped? In this case, none of the above: Transparency, accountability, working well with others, merging development and aid, timeliness, having targets set by NGOs "on the ground", etc., etc. all factor in, but not all have the same importance.

For example, there's a problem with countries that prefer to work with civilian organizations "on the ground", or with monies that are donated to private groups that don't share the money with international agencies like the Red Cross.

One could see a bias against non-military/governmental organizations--take Zimbabwe for an example, where a lot of private international aid organizations, and the US government, didn't want to just turn over aid to Mugabe's administration--or with some private organization that doesn't think donating most of them money that donors could have given directly to the Red Cross indirectly to the Red Cross is just poor management and PR. Smaller countries, or countries that primarily donate via tax revenues, might have less of a problem with these things.

In principle (which is often a way of saying "quite to the contrary") it might be possible to rework the numbers, but not from anything I've seen on the website.

http://www.daraint.org/web_en/index.php

I found the Spanish version to have a nicer presentation: Click on "espanol" (if the default homepage isn't the Spanish one) and then on "HRI" for a nice visual graphic. Flash 8 required.