Working Paper
Multilateral development aid
This survey of the 2016 replenishments of three multilateral development bank soft funds and of the Global Fund for AIDS, TB and Malaria shows that a significant re-set of the multilateral development finance system is taking place, with grant...
Blog
Energy subsidies are bigger than aid in more than half of poor countries … but we spend very little trying to reduce them
by
Neil McCulloch
October 2017
Which of the following do you think is the most important need in developing countries? Free health services for all to reduce child and maternal...
Working Paper
The economics and politics of foreign aid and domestic revenue
The main argument of this paper is that there is considerable heterogeneity in the way aid can shape tax performance in developing countries: through behavioural effects, donor conditionality, recipient policy reform and technical assistance; and...
Working Paper
Energy subsidies, international aid, and the politics of reform
Energy subsidy reform is critical to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals and tackling climate change. This paper sets out the evidence on the scale of subsidies and their impact. It then reviews the actions of donors in encouraging and...
Project
Conference on aid - principles, policies and performance
Theme: 2006-07
Aid is one of the most challenging development issues facing the international community. There is now a pressing need to evaluate performance to date, and the future for aid in light of recent events such as the post-Monterrey consensus to...
Project
Growth and employment
Theme: 2010-11
Project
Development policy and practice: competing paradigms and approaches
Theme: 2014-15
This project uses UNU-WIDER’s high level of convening power – its ability to mobilize senior figures in the development policy debate from different paradigms – and its ability to stand aside from the fashions and pressures of the academy, to bring...
Working Paper
Donor-supported approaches to improving extractives governance
Donor interest in the extractives sector is based upon the premise that it represents an opportunity to improve a country’s development prospects. However, in many cases the presence of extractive resources is associated with poor economic...
Working Paper
Aiding education? The effect of international aid on local educational enrolment in Nigeria
Education is associated with a range of positive micro and macro effects. It is hence no surprise that donors have recently increased the amount of official development aid specifically focused on restoring and maintaining education in less-developed...
Working Paper
New estimates of the cost of ending poverty and its global distribution
This paper makes new estimates of the cost of ending poverty and the global distribution of both the cost and poverty itself. First, the paper discusses definitions of ‘ending’ poverty, arguing that there is an overemphasis (e.g. SDG 1) on the...
Working Paper
Aid and fragile states
Aid is still an important feature of the development landscape. Fragile states, in particular, have the greatest development needs but due to their poor governance they are the least likely countries to use aid effectively to meet their development...
Journal Article
The dynamic effects of aid and taxes on government spending
This article examines the impact of foreign aid and taxes on government spending for 67 developing countries during 1980–2013 using dynamic heterogeneous (panel) time-series techniques. We find that spending, aid and tax ratios comprise an...
Working Paper
Aid, taxes, and government spending
A substantial amount of aid to developing countries is given to the government, or goes through the budget, meaning it should have an impact on government fiscal behaviour (particularly on government spending). The few existing empirical studies on...
Blog
What is next for development effectiveness in a post-aid world?
by
Nilima Gulrajani
December 2022
Improving the effectiveness of global development spending may seem like a fool's errand given the state of the world today. Yet this is precisely the...
Working Paper
The dynamics of domestic revenue mobilization across four decades
We utilize the recently updated UNU-WIDER Government Revenue Dataset, which covers key indicators on tax and non-tax revenues for 196 countries since the 1980s, to study the dynamics of government revenue tax collection across selected periods from...
Working Paper
Does aid to the productive sectors cause manufacturing sector growth in Africa?
In recent decades, Africa has received a large share of official development assistance compared to other regions of the world. Using AidData for 2000–13, this paper examines the effects of aid to productive sectors on manufacturing growth in Africa...