Who gives the most overseas aid?

I hadn't looked at rich countries' overseas aid budgets recently, but had thought that the UK and US were both moving towards the top of the list for the most generous countries. Their governments had been talking about supporting Africa and promoting their healthcare initiatives there.

But shock. When I looked at the actual figures (at http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/27/55/40381862.pdf - an Adobe Acrobat file), the UK is in the bottom half of most generous countries, and the US is least generous of the thirty rich countries surveyed. If you look at who they are giving to (at http://www.oecd.org/countrylist/0,3349,en_2649_34447_1783495_1_1_1_1,00.html), it is mainly to strategically important countries which at the moment is Iraq and Afghanistan. Other rich countries also give lots of their money to these two states. So overseas development aid has foreign policy goals as a leading consideration, and isn't that big to begin with.

The most generous countries (and their money generally goes to the poorest people) are the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Luxembourg? They kept quiet about it. They have a reputation as the bankers of Europe, so hardly who you would think of as generous governmental donors.

I don't have the figures for total country donations after making allowance for private donations, but I don't think it changes things massively. Somewhere on the web there was a really good analysis of total national giving after considering many different forms of transfer (such as allowing in immigrants and sending money to families overseas). Definitively proving that so-and-so country is least generous seems pointless, however.

The figures are often used by critics of the West. However, the generosity of a country does not seem solely to be a function of geography or political system; Japan gives nearly as little as the US, and East European former communist countries do not give much either despite being fairly rich. To give credit where due, the Czech Republic gives most. I would like to see the donations given by the former communist countries when they were communist, or nouveau-oil-riche countries in Africa.