SHORT NOTE ARE AID AGENCIES CHANGING THEIR PRACTICES? LIYA PALAGASHVILI 1,2 and CLAUDIA R. WILLIAMSON 3 * 1 School of Law, SUNY Purchase & New York University, Harrison, NY, USA 2 Department of Economics, State University of New York, Purchase, NY, USA 3 Finance and Economics, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS, USA Abstract: Using data from 2004 to 2008 2012, we provide the first multi-year agency monitoring of Development Assistance Committee (DAC), multilateral and United Nations (UN) agencies. Our results suggest that, on average, DAC donor performance has declined while multilateral and UN agency performance has increased. Specifically, multilateral and UN agencies are more transparent and specialized while DAC donors are less specialized and failed to improve in other categories. © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Keywords: foreign aid; best practices; donor rankings JEL Classification: O1; O2; F3 INTRODUCTION Since the disappointment of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), donors have pledged to ‘best aid practices’, with particular emphasis on transparency and coordination. In this paper, we ask: Are donors actually changing their practices? We evaluate agency level practices in order to determine if donors actually alter their behaviour as they claim they should. We focus on four areas: transparency, overhead costs, aid specialization and selective allocation. We collect donor level data from Easterly and Pfutze (2008), Easterly and Williamson (2011) and Palagashvili and Williamson (2017) (henceforth EP, EW, and PW respectively) *Correspondence to: Liya Palagashvili, SUNY Purchase & New York University, School of Law; Department of Economics, State University of New York, Purchase, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, NY 10577, USA. E-mail: liya.palagashvili@purchase.eduClaudia R. Williamson, Finance and Economics, Mississippi State University, Box 9580, 312K McCool Hall, Mississippi State, Mississippi 39762, USA. E-mail: claudia.williamson@msstate.edu © 2020 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Journal of International Development J. Int. Dev. (2020) Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/jid.3481