Background: Foreign aid has been shown to be favourably biased towards small countries. This study investigated whether country size bias also occurs in national malaria policy and development assistance from international agencies. Methods: Data from publicly available sources were collected with countries as observational units. The exploratory data analysis was based on the conceptual framework with socio-economic, environmental and institutional parameters. The strength of relationships was estimated by the Pearson and polychoric correlation coefficients. The correlation matrix was explored by factor analysis.