1. How do the countries compare in terms of how much they receive and donate from other countries? Are there countries that donate much more than they receive or receive much more than they donate?
2. Do the countries that mostly receive or mostly donate tend to cluster around specific geographical areas of the world? Are there neighboring countries that have radically different patterns in terms of how much they receive vs. how much they donate?
3. Are there any major differences in amount of the top 5 most frequent purposes of disbursements?
4. How does the amount donated vs. amount received change over time for each country? Are there countries that mostly send or mostly receive and countries that have a similar amount of donations they receive and send? Are there countries that change their role over time? That is, they used to mostly send donations and turn into mostly receiving donations and vice-versa? Are there countries in which you can find a sudden increase ("peak") or a sudden decrease ("valley")?
As we can see, India, Thailand, Brazil, Columbia and Poland are among top Countries that received aid whereas USA, Japan, Germany, United Kingdom and France are among top Countries that provided the most aid. In year 1992, Poland and Kuwait show sudden increase in the received amount. USA show sudden peak in donating amount in the year 1980, 1981 and 1992.
5. What are the top 10 purposes of disbursements (in terms of total amount of disbursement) and how does their relative amount compare over time? E.g., are there purposes that tend to be prominent for a period of time and others that become more prominent during other periods?
6. Who are the major donors and to which countries do they donate the most and how much? And conversely, who are the major receivers and which countries do they receive from the most and how much? We only care about the top 10 recipients and the top 20 donors over time for this question.
7. Considering only the top 5 purposes of donation, how does the relationship between countries look like in terms of purposes? What composition of purposes do the donations between each pair of countries have? Are there countries that donate to a given country using multiple purposes? Or do counties always donate using one single purpose when donating to another country? The same as the previous question, we only care about the top 10 recipients and the top 20 donors here
8. For this last exercise you have to extend the analysis above to see how the patterns of donations change over time. Focusing again on the top 8 recipients and top 20 donors how do the patterns of donations (who donates to whom and how much) change over time? Are there sudden changes? Are there countries that always donate to other countries? Are there major shifts (say a country used to donate to a specific set of countries and then it changes to other countries)?