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Tips for Researchers

This site presents data in three tiers:

  • Fast Facts—provides the user with a quick overview of FY2010 U.S. foreign assistance.
  • By Country—provides the user with U.S. foreign economic assistance data arranged by country. The data are presented in downloadable Excel spreadsheets for the fiscal years 2001–2010. Forty tables are available for each country. A filter will help you find the data of interest to you.

  • Detailed Data—contains U.S. Economic and Military Assistance obligation data by country from 1946 to 2010. It includes all countries that have received economic or military assistance from the United States since 1945 and are considered an "Independent State" by the U.S. Department of State.

    Data are available in either historical or constant dollars. The historical-dollar series uses current-dollar values actually obligated or lent in that year. The constant-dollar price series, converts each year's loans and obligations amounts into most recent year reported dollar equivalents. The constant-dollar series allows the user to compare loans and obligations that occurred in different time periods.

Detailed Data

Here are some suggestions to help you find the data you need on the Detailed Data area Greenbook website and information on changes made this year to the database.

The quickest way to get oriented to the data series used in the online database is to print the Reporting Concepts of the Greenbook and the Summary of all Countries from the print edition. These pages will provide a useful reference as you navigate through the site and use the dropdown lists to extract data from the database.

The print publication of the Greenbook has a country orientation; each page provides information about one country. This orientation is fine for researchers interested in a country. The "Country Reports" option will work well for researchers with a country interest.

This web presentation of the Greenbook offers more flexibility for researchers than the print publication. If the orientation of your research is a program or account, rather than a country, the "Program Reports" or "Account Reports" should meet your needs. These reports allow you to specify a program or account and obtain funding information for all countries.

You can switch between the country orientation and program orientation with ease on this website. The row stubs (either program names or country names) are hyperlinks. When viewing a program table that lists countries receiving funds under that program, you can select a country name to get the Country Report for that country. In a parallel fashion, the program names on a Country Report are hyperlinks to the respective Program Reports.

There is a distinction between Programs and Accounts. "Program" data series correspond exactly to the line items in the print publication; for example, Food Aid Title II, or Peace Corps. "Account" refers to individual funding accounts; for example International Disaster Assistance or International Affairs Technical Assistance. (Please note that some programs are the same as funding accounts.)

In past years the specific account data was not available from the Greenbook database. These individual accounts were grouped and summed prior to incorporation in the print Greenbook. The historical record at the Account level is not comprehensive. In the past, some individual accounts were not retained, only the program total was saved in the database. You will notice on the lower half of the Program Page a second report creation option for the data of these historical records.

The Greenbook methodology was developed at a time when virtually all economic assistance was implemented through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). The Greenbook data collection effort was essentially a USAID exercise. In recent years more and more federal departments and agencies have begun receiving appropriated funds for international programs. The Greenbook data collection effort was significantly expanded in response to this trend. Using the Account Option on the Program Page you can see the country allocation of many of these accounts.

Selecting an indicator from the Account option extracts the most recent annual data and presents the total and subtotals by region and country. In some cases the available information on the account does not indicate country allocations. Either the account did not have country-specific activities or the country allocation was not publicly available.