Someone from the MCC emails:
Thanks for having our back. For more MCC wonkery, the CGD folks usually have us mostly right.The other thing behind our low disbursement rate that people don't understand (and we explain poorly), besides the fact that the partner countries are responsible for actually spending the money, is that early expenses are for relatively cheap things. Not only are we almost never giving out money for humanitarian/consumption projects, but in the first years of these compacts, much of the money goes to really boring things, like revising land registration/financial sector/other regulatory policies, feasibility studies for infrastructure works, etc (not to mention setting up an administrative structure to manage the whole thing). "Soft infrastructure" investments are less expensive, and also less flashy (to non-economists). We get no pictures of kids with distended bellies smiling about their new cadastral maps. Things that burn money and make good photo ops, like building irrigation systems and roads tend to happen in years 3-4 (of 5 year programs), and the first MCC compacts (Honduras, Nicaragua, Madagascar - all signed in 2005) are only barely starting to get there. Alas, none of this lends itself very well to a snappy elevator speech, which is why we can look like an incompetent bureaucracy if people don't understand how our model is different from traditional aid programs.
Sounds a bit like that letter InstaProf got from Pfizer after commenting how glad he was that their drug was able to control his wife's unusual heart condition. Some industries get so much crap based on one-sided analyses, or outright assumptions, that the people involved are downright grateful to actually receive balanced commentary or compliments once in a while.
So at this point, what would be a proper way to assess the progress made?
Someone from the MCC emails:
"why we can look like an incompetent bureaucracy if people don't understand how our model is different from traditional aid programs."
If they want funding, they should circulate a Prospectus..
It sounds like the MCC is complicated, but not impossible, to evaluate at this point. An evaluation also has to consider the incentive effect - are countries encouraged to take positive steps to qualify for the money? When the MCC was first approved, I heard an analyst speaking against it. Regarding the list of steps that countries were supposed to take to qualify, she said "well if a country does all that, they won't need aid!" She seemed totally unaware that this was kind of the point.
I don't know anything about the following study or its authors, but here is a link to research by two people at Harvard's Kennedy School:
http://ssrn.com/abstract=896293
From their abstract:
"Even though the MCC is still in its infancy, we find substantial evidence that countries respond to MCC incentives by improving their indicators. Controlling for general time trends, potential recipients of MCC funds improve 25 percent more indicators after the MCC was created than before it."