Working Paper
What Determines Foreign Aid to Papua New Guinea? An Inter-temporal Model of Aid Allocation
This paper models the inter-temporal allocation of foreign development aid to Papua New Guinea (PNG). A formal theoretical model of aid allocation is developed, in which aid to any one country is determined jointly with aid to all other recipient...
Book Chapter
Lessons for Japanese foreign aid from research on aid’s impact
Japan has provided foreign aid for some 60 years. Japan’s aid has grown and evolved as it became richer and as the developing world changed too. Japan is a strong supporter of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and revised its ODA Charter in...
Working Paper
Economics and Politics of Official Loans versus Grants
The paper examines a wide range of issues relating to the mix between loans and grants as well as the degree of concessionality of loans. A number of empirical tests are carried out based on annual panel data over 1970 to 1999 for 22 donor countries...
Blog
The Present Development Debate and Beyond
Finn Tarp The current global development agenda is centred on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), established at the turn of the Millennium. They...
Blog
Reorientating the Results Based Agenda: Interviews by Carl-Gustav Lindén
by
Carl-Gustav Lindén
March 2013
21 March 2013 In foreign aid, results are the buzz word of the day; evaluation, monitoring, and quality control are the means of demonstrating to...
Blog
Imperfect Data Increases Uncertainty
by
Carl-Gustav Lindén
May 2013
9 May 2013 Carl-Gustav Lindén The world is a complex place where risk and uncertainty are an everyday challenge. Decision makers at all levels say...
Blog
Making Finance the Servant not the Master
Tony Addison Today, there is much frustration with the financial sector. Society’s precious savings are not being put to the best of uses—investing...
Blog
Africa’s Low Hanging Fruits
by
Justin Lin, Yan Wang
April 2014
23 April 2014 Justin Yifu Lin and Yan Wang At the onset of its miraculous rise in 1979, China had been trapped in poverty for centuries and was poorer...
Policy Brief
Enhancing Development through Policy Coherence
Policy coherence implies that donors in pursuing domestic policy objectives should avoid adversely affecting the development prospects of poor countries. To achieve policy coherence donors and multilateral institutions need to ensure security and...
Blog
What’s in a Name?: Human Rights, Human Development, and Human Dignity
by
David L. Richards
December 2012
David L. Richards Over the past decades, the terms ‘human rights’ and ‘human development’ have been characterized as being: complementary to one...
Blog
Lessons from Africa's Democratic Upheavals
by
Danielle Resnick
April 2012
Danielle Resnick During the last month, three democracies in Africa witnessed incumbent presidents exit office in very different ways. The most...
Blog
The Macroeconomic Management of Foreign Aid
by
Tony Addison, Tseday Jemaneh Mekasha, Milla Nyyssölä, Lucy Scott,
Finn Tarp, Tuuli Paukkeri
January 2012
Tony Addison, Tseday Mekasha, Milla Nyyssölä, Lucy Scott, Finn Tarp, Tuuli Ylinen To meet development objectives, aid recipients and their donor...
Blog
Jobs are Development
by
Carl-Gustav Lindén
October 2012
Carl-Gustav Lindén One important part of ReCom–Research and Communication on Foreign Aid is the sharing of results. October saw the largest effort so...
Working Paper
It Works; It Doesn't; It Can, But that Depends...
This paper surveys 50 years of empirical research on the macroeconomic impact of aid, looking mainly at studies examining the link between aid and growth. It argues that studies dating until the late 1990s produced either contradictory or...
Working Paper
Is the International Community Helping to Recreate the Pre-Conditions for War in Sierra Leone?
‘In a very real sense, the conditions that spawned the war and inflicted gruesome casualties on Sierra Leone’s citizens have not disappeared’, warned the International Crisis Group. In this paper we argue that many of those conditions are being...
Working Paper
Diamonds, Foreign Aid, and the Uncertain Prospects for Post-Conflict Reconstruction in Sierra Leone
This article examines the external and internal dimensions of post-conflict reconstruction in Sierra Leone. The United Nations, bilateral donors such as the United Kingdom, and transnational non-governmental organizations and aid agencies have been...
Working Paper
Transforming Conflict with an Economic Dividend
Peace can generate an economic dividend, which can be further increased by appropriate economic reform. This dividend can in turn be used to raise popular support for conflict resolution measures along the road to achieving a final political...
Working Paper
Making Fiscal Space Happen!
Debt relief and the scaling up of aid to low-income countries should allow for greater fiscal space for expenditure programmes to create long-term growth and lower poverty rates. But designing a suitable medium-term fiscal framework that fosters a...
Working Paper
Analysis of Deviations and Delays in Aid Disbursements
The study seeks to identify donor-specific factors that cause donors to delay aid disbursement, and to apply a double standard in dealing with the non-compliance of a recipient with regard to aid conditionalities, a practice that promotes uncertainty...
Blog
Will Norway’s model of Sovereign Wealth Fund work in Tanzania?: A reality check
by
Alan R. Roe
May 2016
Several countries in Africa – including Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Uganda - have recently discovered large oil and gas or other mineral...
Working Paper
A Contract Perspective on the International Finance Facility
The present paper is a first attempt to develop a theoretical model using a short-term vis-à-vis long-term contract framework within which donor countries’ endorsement or rejection decision towards the recently proposed International Finance Facility...
Working Paper
Modelling Aid Allocation
There is a widespread view that political criteria have received less emphasis in aid allocation since the end of the cold war, with a greater share of aid subsequently being based on developmental criteria. An observed increase in aid effectiveness...
Working Paper
Social Capital, Survival Strategies, and their Potential for Post-Conflict Governance in Liberia
This paper investigates how people created, adapted and used social capital and conflict resolution during more than a decade of violent conflict in Liberia, and the potential of such capital to contribute to post-conflict peacebuilding and self...
Working Paper
Aid, Debt Relief and New Sources of Finance for Meeting the Millennium Development Goals
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have lofty expectations regarding the impact of official development aid. Are these expectations valid? This paper surveys the literature on aid and growth. It finds that practically all aid studies since the...
Working Paper
Population Ethics and the Value of Life
Public policies often involve choices of alternatives in which the size and the composition of the population may vary. Examples are the allocation of resources to prenatal care and the design of aid packages to developing countries. In order to...
Working Paper
Multilateral Aid Agencies and Strategic Donor Behaviour
The paper builds on recent empirical evidence on the importance of strategic donor behaviour in aid allocation in order to develop a theoretical model where donor pressure on a recipient for influencing the aid disbursement of a multilateral...
Working Paper
Post-Conflict Recovery
Countries as diverse as Afghanistan, Angola, and Sierra Leone are now attempting to recover from major wars, often amidst continuing insecurity. The challenge is to achieve a broad-based recovery that benefits the majority of people. The economic and...
Working Paper
The Volatility of Aid
Issues related to the volatility of aid flows are now becoming crucial in view of their relevance to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. The paper examines aid volatility using data for 66 aid recipients over the period 1973-2002. We...
Working Paper
Aid Allocation and Fragile States
This paper summarises research on aid allocation and effectiveness, highlighting the current findings of recent research on aid allocation to fragile states. Fragile states are defined by the donor community as those with either critically poor...
Working Paper
Which Types of Aid Have the Most Impact?
The paper uses an aid disaggregation approach to examine the impact of different types of aid on the fiscal sector of the aid-recipient country. It uses time-series data on different types of aid (project aid, programme aid, technical assistance and...
Working Paper
On the Empirics of Aid and Growth
The paper contributes to the empirics of aid and growth by taking a fresh look at the aid-policies-growth nexus emanating from the very influential but also debatable paper on the subject by Burnside and Dollar: ‘Aid, Policies and Growth’. We employ...
Working Paper
Aid Project Proliferation and Absorptive Capacity
Much public discussion about foreign aid has focused on whether and how to increase its quantity. But recently aid quality has come to the fore, by which is meant the efficiency of the aid delivery process. This paper focuses on one process problem...