The bare facts about foreign aid give few grounds for expecting much in the way of achievement. The effectiveness of aid has indeed been a continuing and controversial issue for 50 years and an entire literary genre is devoted to it. As mentioned earlier, the first decade of the 2000s saw unprecedented energy aimed at assessing its value. The Paris conference of 2005 singled out improving effectiveness as the principal objective of aid reform, followed up with further declarations in Ghana in 2008 and Busan in December 2011 which have in turn led to extensive evaluation efforts. Major international conferences on aid evaluation such as one in Mexico in June 2011 are being held with increasing frequency.