Journal Article
Child Mortality

If development assistance targeted at specific sectors is not used as intended, aid is said to be fungible. Using country-specific estimates of the degree of aid fungibility in “pro-poor” government expenditure sectors, I assess the effect on child mortality. Results indicate that fungibility within these sectors does not help to explain differences in mortality. However, when separating the sample into democracies and non-democracies, results suggest that pro-poor expenditures influence mortality in non-democracies only and that aid treated as fungible tends to be used efficiently in democracies.