Griekenland, Italië en Portugal lopen achter op het geven van ontwikkelingshulp (en)

Greece, Italy and Portugal feature at the bottom of the list of west European donors for development aid while the union as a whole remains the biggest aid provider in the world, giving more than originally planned last year.

According to a report to be published on Tuesday (3 April) by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a Paris-based economics think-tank, the EU donated around €48 billion or 0.42 percent of its GDP in 2006, AFP reported.

Around one quarter of the figure stands for one-off debt cancellations for Iraq and Nigeria.

The EU's contribution represents 57 percent of the world's development aid with both Japan (0.25% of GDP) and the US (0.17%) lagging behind Europe.

Within the union, there are also differences in how much member states contribute. While the "old" west European countries have given themselves individual targets of 0.33 percent of GDP, the "new" member states committed to 0.17 percent by 2010 and 0.33 percent by 2015.

South Europeans were furthest behind the EU aid target last year, according to the OECD study, with Greece recording the lowest donations (0.16%), followed by Italy (0.20%) and Portugal (0.21%).

Sweden (1.03%), Luxembourg (0.89%) and the Netherlands (0.81%) stand on the other side of the aid table as the most generous donors, according to AFP.

The European Commission recently urged member states to better coordinate their development aid activities as they often overlap and are inefficient, with too many agencies working on the same kinds of projects and focusing on a few countries while others are abandoned.