sunk costs financial markets and contestability abstract this paper analyzes the proposition that the theory or contestable markets will yield good predictions for markets in which sunk costs although present are unimportant two results are of interest 1 if costs are at all sunk incumbent firms will be able to engage in strategic behavior with respect to entrants 2 if no costs are sunk but firms finance investment by borrowing incumbent firms will be able to engage in strategic behavior with respect to entrants in these cases one must analyze strategic behavior of incumbent firms to analyze market performance

exhaustible resources non convex costs and contestability a reply in his comment on my paper geir asheim neatly disproves the arguments in my 1991 footnote 13 and the paragraph to which it refers trying to force the equilibrium into the mould of contestability i was unmindful of the possibility that there could be a period when all firms produced this possibility allows for asheim s interesting observations including that ramsey prices result when price taking can be assumed if all firms are active to begin i wish to stress the points which have been established in the two papers first equilibrium must satisfy two types of intertemporal arbitrage condition a marginal and an average one the novel condition is the latter the contribution of contestability theory satisfying it leaves no incentive to reallocate a discrete amount of production to another time period it helps give rise to what seems to be an unusual hybrid sort of rent that asheim identifies as the user cost when contestability holds sway it is price less average not marginal cost which rises at the rate of interest links to the more customary form of user cost however can be discerned in the marginal condition which is necessary to preclude incentives to reallocate production at the margin among time periods newbery 1981 calls this hotelling s arbitrage principle it appears in asheim s equation 2 since mr p under his assumptions of first competition and then contestability on the downward sloping part of ac however his equation

urban decline and durable housing urban decline is not the mirror image of growth and durable housing is the primary reason the nature of decline is so different this paper presents a model of urban decline with durable housing and verifies these implications of the model 1 city growth rates are skewed so that cities grow more quickly than they decline 2 urban decline is highly persistent 3 positive shocks increase population more than they increase housing prices 4 negative shocks decrease housing prices more than they decrease population 5 if housing prices are below construction costs then the city declines and 6 the combination of cheap housing and weak labor demand attracts individuals with low levels of human capital to declining cities

price changes supply elasticities industry organization and dairy output distribution long run price elasticities of milk supply are decomposed into price elasticities of yield herd size and farm population for northeastern u s dairy farms these elasticities are shown to vary with farm size because of size related differences in capital intensity specialization yield and herd size variability and rates of entry exit into dairy in the short run price responsiveness is shown to decrease with farm size in the long run large farms are shown to be most price responsive results suggest that lower milk prices could make revenue distribution less equal in both the short and long run by altering output and population distributions

aid and donor trust in recipient country systems abstract the 2005 paris declaration on aid effectiveness sets targets for increased use by donors of recipient country systems for managing aid the target is premised on a view that country systems are strengthened when donors trust recipients to manage aid funds but undermined when donors manage aid through their own separate parallel systems this study provides an analytical framework for understanding donors decisions to trust or bypass country systems empirical tests are conducted using data from three oecd dac surveys designed to monitor progress toward paris declaration goals tests show that use of recipient country systems is positively related to 1 the donor s reputational stake in the country s development as proxied by the donor s share of aid provided to the recipient 2 the trustworthiness or quality of those systems as measured by cross country corruption indicators and 3 donors risk tolerance as proxied by public support for aid provision in donor countries findings are robust to corrections for potential sample selection omitted variables or endogeneity bias

foreign aid and human development the impact of foreign aid to the health sector author affiliation claudia r williamson department of economics west virginia university p o box 6025 morgantown wv 26506 6025 usa e mail claudia williamson mail wvu edu acknowledgment i would like to thank the editor and two anonymous referees for their time valuable comments and helpful suggestions i would also like to thank peter t leeson and russell s sobel for their valuable comments and suggestions also i would like to thank matt e ryan for his helpful comments in addition i appreciate the comments received from tomi ovaska and the 2006 southern economic association conference participants 1 introductioninternational aid is one of the most powerful weapons in the war against poverty today that weapon is underused and badly targeted there is too little aid and too much of what is provided is weakly linked to human development united nations development programme 2005 p 75 according to the 2005 human development report united nations development programme 2005 there is a general consensus that foreign aid s first objective should be human development in 2000 governments from various countries met at the united nations and signed the millennium declaration a pledge to free our fellow men women and children from the abject and dehumanizing conditions of extreme poverty one way of achieving these goals is through development assistance united nations development programme 2005 this advice has been widely accepted in the donor community during the past five years because total aid to the health sector has more than doubled for example as illustrated in figure 1 from 1999 to 2004 aid to the health sector rose from 1930 to 4435 millions of 2004 dollars oecd 2007 figure 1 foreign aid to the health sector 1973 2004 figure omitted see article image with growing intensity given to international human development aid an analysis of its effectiveness is worthwhile both conceptual and empirical literature debates the effectiveness of foreign aid for economic development without a general consensus on the role of foreign assistance in economic development two contrasting hypotheses have emerged one is a public interest argument where some authors state that aid can and should be used to assist in the development process sen 1999 sachs 2005 the other is a public choice hypothesis that presents arguments indicating that foreign assistance is ineffective and has the potential to damage future growth opportunities bauer 2000 easterly 2001 these two competing hypotheses lead to different predictions on the use of foreign aid for human development for a clear answer one must turn to empirical analysis current empirical literature primarily supports the public choice perspective indicating that foreign aid is ineffective in promoting economic development filmer and pritchett 1999 svensson 1999 filmer hammer and pritchett 2000 2002 knack 2001 brumm 2003 brautigam and knack 2004 economides kalyvitis and philippopoulos 2004 djankov montalvo and reynal querol 2005 hartford and klein 2005 and heckelman and knack 2005 in these studies the authors focus on the impact of foreign aid on economic development and find no significant impact however in a recent study by gomanee girma and morrissey 2005 the authors show that aid can improve human welfare through increases in certain public expenditures supporting the public interest predictions their methodological approach neglects to control for endogeneity and this could lead to biased results thus further analysis is required with the recent shift in the promotion of aid from economic to human development it is timely to investigate the role of foreign aid for human development purposes this paper provides the next step in the literature by establishing the link between foreign aid and human welfare

external assistance and the peace process in el salvador abstract external assistance has played a critical role in the salvadoran peace process yet the priorities of the donors have often diverged from those of the peace accords moreover several major external assistance actors notably the international financial institutions have failed to exercise peace conditionality they have not used formal performance criteria or informal policy dialogue to encourage the timely implementation of high priority peace programs and the mobilization of greater domestic resources for this purpose these institutions have recently broadened their mandates to encompass military expenditure reduction and good governance while these concerns are particularly germane in countries emerging from civil war the case of el salvador demonstrates that they have yet to be fully incorporated into actual practice

on non convex costs and dynamic consistency in an exhaustible resource market noncooperative intertemporal equilibrium in an exhaustible resource market where firms extraction costs are u shaped is analyzed under the hypotheses of contestability theory if there are two or more firms each with an identical deposit then limitations on the total resource stock imply strategic interaction even where there is perfect contestability these results raise questions about the robustness of properties claimed for contestable markets as well as about the realism of expecting that equilibrium may be established in this type of market copyright 1991 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

do performance measures of donors aid allocation underperform indices of donor performance abound their recent popularity has occurred within the context of pessimism over aid s impact and optimism over the effect of changes in donor behaviour rankings of donor allocative performance aim to change donor behaviour either through direct pressure on governments or indirectly through public engagement the indices themselves rely on descriptive measures and typically claim methodological superiority over positive alternatives due to their simplicity however there are two problems first measures do not seem robust to simple variations in methodology second correlation amongst competing indices is low leading to a host of contradictory judgements this offers neither clear technical guidance nor consistent political pressure the advantages and disadvantages of the approach are discussed building upon the more general critique of aggregate indices i suggest a graphical solution that embraces the advantages of the descriptive approach including ease of public communication while avoiding some of its major weaknesses which typically stem from aggregation

aid selectivity according to augmented criteria a dominant trend in the literature maintains that donor assistance should be targeted to poor countries with sound institutions and policies in this context donor selectivity refers to what extent aid is allocated according to the principles of this canonical model this paper shows that it is legitimate for donors to simultaneously use other selectivity criteria corresponding either to expected factors of aid effectiveness or to handicaps to development it is notably argued that vulnerability to exogenous shocks and low level of human capital should be considered as selectivity criteria taking these other criteria into account dramatically changes the assessment of donor selectivity

some determinants of foreign aid to india 1960 1985 abstract using a unique data set of aid to india from all sources 1960 1985 we discuss the magnitude and composition of aid and present a principal components analysis of aid giving we then attempt to get at the underlying patterns and causes of aid giving using factor analytic techniques and explain the level of foreign aid by employing a partial adjustment model we find that latent motivations to classify the donor countries into four convenient groups each with different political and economic motivations we also find that the latent variables capturing the motivations of the united states western european countries eastern european countries as well as last year s aid and the balance of trade but not gdp growth are significant determinants of the level of aid

aid the public sector and the market in less developed countries a reply the article in this journal by mosley et al i987 concludes its analysis of aid effectiveness as demonstrating inability of development aid over more than twenty years to provide a net increment to overall growth in the third world p 636 this note purports to show that this conclusion which is ostensibly distressing as the authors claim is not warranted the section of the study which is the basis of the conclusion cited and the subject of this note is a cross section regression analysis full details of which are shown in mosley et al table 3 the note is concerned with the relation between the dependent variable specified as the growth rate of real gdp per cent per annum hereafter gdp and aid specified as a percentage of gdp hereafter aid the aid results with only two significant positive coefficients in one subsample certainly give no basis for claiming aid effectiveness in terms of gdp growth the intention in this note is to interpret the results which are assumed to be valid this is made possible by the fact that the authors have helpfully provided the full input set of mean values derived from the raw data from this it is possible to calculate the gdp aid relationship for each country for the second and third period the procedure for deriving these relationships is as follows for each country the mean values of the time series of gdp and aid are extracted from the data for i 960 70 and for i 970 80 using i 960 70 as the base the signs of the change in the levels of the gdp and aid mean values between periods are recorded this is repeated for i980 4 with i970 80 mean values as the base the relationship between the two signs is an indication of the effect of aid on gdp in the period in which the change in levels is effected thus in the case of an increase in aid being combined with a decrease in gdp the latter must have fallen relatively to the former and aid effectiveness is negative mutatis mutandis for the other three sign combinations thus generating the appropriate gdp aid relationship for each country in each period a frequency distribution of the four sign combinations relating to the full sample is presented in table i since the signs of the changes in the levels of gdp and aid are derived by making explicit the arithmetic relationship implicit in the data they form a valid base from which to draw conclusions without requiring any test of

the political economy of foreign aid a model of the market for a public good what determines the type and quantity of overseas aid given by individual donor countries answers to this question in the existing literature are polarized into two groups one of them offers a theoretical treatment based on the theory of public goods which is not consistent with the available data and the other offers empirical correlations without any explanatory theory the first group for example pincus and olson and zeckhauser treats aid like defense as an international public good small countries on this approach are free riders spending relatively little themselves while deriving benefits from the expenditures of larger countries but this approach is not consistent with even a casual scrutiny of the oecd aid community in which broadly speaking the smallest countries are the most generous donors 2 the second group for example hoadley and beenstockdiscover correlations between a country s ratio of aid to gnp and certain independent variables which may be expected to influence it e g that country s gnp its dependence on foreign trade its government s position in the ideological spectrum and the state of the domestic economy 3 however these findings are not fitted into any theoretical framework so that it is difficult to work out what they really mean 4 the approach of this paper is to treat foreign aid as a public good for which there is a market albeit a highly imperfect one because the consumers donor country taxpayers are ignorant about the very nature let alone the price of the commodity they are buying on this view factors on the demand side i e taxpayers response to their country s aid program will help to determine the quantity of aid disbursed as well as factors on the supply side such as the donor government s desire to obtain strategic or trading benefits from aid this view

global samaritans donor election cycles and the allocation of humanitarian aid abstract this paper finds a large causal donor election cycle effect in humanitarian aid allocations on average humanitarian aid increases by 19 in the year before elections our identification strategy consists of focusing on donors with fixed election dates making elections clearly exogenous furthermore we find large interaction effects with natural and human disasters this evidence is consistent with our theory that incumbent governments responding to humanitarian disasters can increase voter support for their party and insure against the political fall out of not being seen as representatives of a country with global interests and influence however it is important to stress that despite our findings human and natural disasters explain a substantially larger share of the overall variation in humanitarian aid observed in the data

structure and performance with profit measures based on stock market prices the theory that there is a causal relationship between industry structure conduct and performance is the fundamental premise in the field of industrial organization the most carefully researched component of that general theory is the hypothesis that increasing industrial concentration will give rise to increasing profits this traditional view is important not only because of its prominence in the academic analysis of industrial markets but also because of its implications for government policy especially antitrust policy the traditional view typically has been tested by treating an accounting based measure of industry profit as the dependent variable with concentration and other structural variables as independent variables within a cross section of manufacturing industries at a given point in time numerous papers have found that concentration has a positive impact on profits the methodology adopted in this paper is different the profit measures are based on stock market prices and are adjusted for risk this is an improvement because accounting methods are so poorly adapted to the measurement of economic profit and because risk may vary with concentration 2 39 another methodological innovation is the choice of time series over cross section analysis the question asked is whether the change over time in each industry s level of concentration had an impact on profits this minimizes the problem of omitted or inaccurately measured independent variables since there should be less change in basic structural characteristics over short time periods within an industry than between industries at a single point in time 2 a second important advantage is freedom from a basic assumption of crosssection studies the assumption that the relationship between concentration and profit is homogeneous across industries if the assumption is invalid empirical results are subject to bias two tests 7 26 have firmly rejected the homogeneity assumption 3

on aid growth and good policies this study provides a critical analysis of the growth regressions in burnside and dollar 2000 first we analyse the relationship between aid and government expenditure in a modified neo classical growth model one of the main results of the analysis is that while good policies spur growths they may at the same time reduce the effectiveness of foreign aid second we show that the econometric results in burnside and dollar emphasising the crucial role of interaction between aid and good policies in the growth process are fragile as they are extremely data dependent finally we demonstrate that the burnside and dollar data lend support to the idea that the association between aid and growth can be approximated by decreasing returns to aid this finding conforms well to regression results in other recent studies

aid intensity in africa abstract aid to sub saharan africa ssa is falling rapidly after reaching historically high levels in the early 1990s we provide a critical review of aid data and place the resource intensity of current flows in crosscountry and intertemporal perspective aid to ssa is not unusually high given the structural characteristics of african countries but it rose more rapidly than predicted until the mid 1990s we introduce the concept of transactions intensity and show that by some measures the management costs accompanying each dollar of aid to africa are comparatively high

a two part sample selection model of british bilateral foreign aid allocation the allocation of british bilateral foreign aid among developing countries is simultaneously modelled focusing on allocations during the period 1980 87 two aid allocation decisions are analysed using a variant of the lee maddala econometric model the first decision concerns the determination of developing country eligibility for aid while the second concerns the amount of aid eligible countries are allocated given the implied two part decision making process sample selection techniques are employed it is hypothesized that british bilateral aid eligibility and amount decisions are based on bristain s humanitarian commercial and political interests in developing countries results obtained indicate that these decisions are generally consistent with each of these interests especially those relating to the political importance of commonwealth members

contestability vs competition analyzes the ultra free entry as normative contribution to industrial organization ultra free entry in context of the evolving field of industrial organization assessment of the conceptual validity of william baumol elizabeth bailey john panzar and robert willig s analysis in representing the nature of competition empirical issues in measuring and testing ultra free entry ebsco

aid fragmentation or aid pluralism the effect of multiple donors on child survival in developing countries 1990 2010 while most policy makers and researchers stress the negative impact of aid fragmentation on development outcomes in recipient countries we argue that the greater diversity of perspectives entailed by higher multiplicity of donors can help select better policies we hypothesize a u shaped relationship countries with a moderate number of donors fare better than countries with either few or many donors the hypothesis is supported by a generalized method of moments gmm analysis of the relationship between health aid donors and child survival in 110 low and middle income countries during 1990 2010

aid proliferation and economic growth a cross country analysis summary we examine whether aid proliferation hinders economic growth by applying the standard aid growth regression to roodman s 2007 dataset with proper correction for possible biases arising from omitted variable and endogeneity problems specifically we include a donor concentration index to capture a low degree of donor proliferation and its interaction terms with aid variables as additional independent variables our empirical results show that the effect of aid concentration on economic growth is positive and favors the hypothesis that aid proliferation has a negative effect on the economic growth of recipient countries especially in africa

aid for the poorest some early lessons of uk experience the paper presents an interim review of recent attempts to reach the poorest people in developing countries through aid policy from the viewpoint of one donor the united kingdom it concludes that the uk has achieved a modest increase in the proportion of aid aimed at the poorest between 1974 and 1979 that poverty focused projects are in general more local cost intensive and have lower rates of return than others and that the principal difficulties in the way of successful implementation of poverty focused projects are excessive size an over rapid rate of disbursement inadequate local cost provisions and failure to specify the target group or the repayment strategy with sufficient precision it is argued that there are political obstacles to removing the second and third of these obstacles in donor countries and to removing the fourth in recipient countries also

non nested models of australia s overseas aid program after briefly surveying the existing on overseas aid motivations some empirical results are presented for australian bilateral aid in terms of the two competing theories in the aid literature namely the recipient need model and the donor interest model the empirical results for austrlia are atypical in that there is support for both hypotheses this is contrast to the results of previous studies of large nation states the united states britain germany france and japan which have found support for the donor interst model but not the recipient need model given that the empirical results reported here are consistent with both models this paper then proceeds to apply the relatively new tests of non nested hypotheses to the models the results indicate that australia s aid program has both recipient need and donor interest concerns i some years the recipient need motive dominates and in other years donor interest dominates

foreign aid an instrument for fighting communism abstract in this paper we test the argument that the sizeable reduction in aggregate aid levels in the 1990s was due to the end of the cold war we test two different models using a dynamic econometric specification on a panel of 17 donor countries spanning the years 1970 97 we find aid to be positively related to military expenditures in the former eastern bloc during the cold war but not in the 1990s suggesting that the reductions in aid disbursements are driven by the disappearance of an important motive for aid we also study the effect on aid allocation but here we do not find any robust effects of the end of the cold war

stackelberg and marshall this paper advocates a generalized n firm stackelberg model as a plausible testable alternative description of oligopoly a pure strategy equilibrium must exist for this model the main result is that efficiency obtains in the limit as the scale of each firm is shrunk relative to demand this is demonstrated for the case of u shaped average cost and also for that of natural monopoly copyright 1990 by american economic association

aid policies and growth reply in burnside and dollar 2000 we used standard regression techniques from the growth literature to measure the effect of foreign aid on growth the main finding in our paper was that the effect of foreign aid on growth depended on the macroeconomic policies of recipient countries in this issue william easterly et al 2004 challenge the robustness of our result to new data before commenting on their findings it is useful to review the basis of our original findings our paper focused on three versions of a panel growth regression estimated using data for 51 countries and six four year periods from 1970 to 1993 these regressions may be summarized as

the political realities of african management abstract amidst the outburst of concern for public management in africa there is frequently a failure to distinguish among its components policy making leadership general internal administration and bureaucratic hygiene accounting procurement the merit system etc each of these four areas is different in the importance that it has for project performance the knowledge base that is available for improving it and the way in which it is affected by african political and social structures as a consequence those seeking to improve public management on the continent frequently are mistaken in the priorities that they establish and import inappropriate management technologies

planning and housing supply in two speed britain modelling local market outcomes summary economic research on uk housing markets has only recently got to grips with measuring and modelling the impact of planning and other public interventions although their importance has long been recognised in theory the interurban panel dataset utilised in this study does represent a step forward by permitting more robust econometric estimation and by incorporating a wider more balanced range of determinant factors a coherent set of relationships governing the key market outcomes house prices new building migration and vacancies can be established the modelling framework is used to explore differences in behavioural responses between markets in high and low demand states simulations are used to track the impact on market outcomes of different policy strategies applied in different types of locality supply measures needed to achieve national targets for house price growth reduction are assessed measures acting on both demand side and supply side variables in areas of high and low demand are compared these suggest that output is more sensitive than price to policies and that quite strong concerted policies would be needed to impact significantly on the major market imbalances currently seen

do developing country wto members receive more aid for trade aft since the world trade organization wto doha development agenda dda negotiations started in 2001 the importance of aid for trade aft has been well recognised as a useful tool for facilitating trade economic growth and social development in developing countries at the wto hong kong ministerial conference in december 2005 the aft initiative was launched and many high income member countries pledged to increase their aft contributions particularly for the least developed member countries ldc this paper aims to assess whether and to what extent the wto s developing member countries have received more aft for this purpose a system generalised method of moments is applied to a sample of 118 recipient countries for the period 2001 10 we find evidence that while ldc wto members on average receive relatively more aft than other developing countries the difference has not increased since launch of the aft initiative among the three categories of aft the positive wto membership effect for ldc members increased for building productive capacity and for trade policy and regulation but declined for infrastructure

barriers to political analysis in aid bureaucracies from principle to practice in dfid and the world bank summary politics has become a central concern in development discourse and yet the use of political analysis as a means for greater aid effectiveness remains limited and contested within development agencies this article uses qualitative data from two governance leaders the united kingdom department for international development and the world bank to analyze the administrative hurdles facing the institutionalization of political analysis in aid bureaucracies we find that programing management and training practices across headquarters and country offices remain largely untouched by a political analysis agenda which suffers from its identification with a small cross national network of governance professionals

media monitoring and capture of public funds evidence from madagascar summary this paper investigates the role of media and monitoring in reducing capture we analyze data on capture of public expenditures by local officials in madagascar our findings indicate important constraints on decentralization of public service delivery in particular in remote areas capture could be successfully constrained through a combination of media programs and monitoring intensive monitoring and access to media reduce capture however the impact of media is conditional on characteristics of the population with high illiteracy in poor regions the effectiveness of newspaper and poster campaigns is limited and radio and television programs are more important to reduce capture

contestable markets an uprising in the theory of industry structure presents a transcript of the presidential address delivered at the 94th meeting of the american economic association on december 29 1981 discussion of developments in the theory of industry structure welfare attributes of contestable markets behavior characteristics of oligopoly equilibrium intertemporal vulnerability to inefficient entry ebsco

the role of potential competition in industrial organization potential competition has been recognized as a mechanism to control the exploitation of market power at least since the work of j b clark 1902 but it was not until 50 years later that economists most notably joe bain and paolo sylos labini refocused attention on the idea with inputs from the theories of imperfect competition optimal control and dynamic games their work evolved into ever more sophisticated models of the reactions of existing competitors to the threat of new competition although the most appropriate models of competitive interaction are those which begin with a specific industry a number of theories have been proposed which attempt to develop more general conclusions my purpose in this paper is to develop an understanding of the strengths and limitations of these alternative theories by examining the available theoretical empirical and institutional knowledge rather than attempt the sisyphean task of recounting every model which relates conditions of entry and market performance i have partitioned the analysis into four major schools of thought according to their most central propositions these are the traditional model of limit pricing dynamic limit pricing the theory of contestable markets and the market efficiency model traditional limit pricing models rest on the assumption that firms respond to entry but are able to earn persistent profits when the structural characteristics of markets make entry difficult dynamic limit pricing is similar but emphasizes that markets can only be temporarily protected from entry contestability theory in its pure form asserts that potential competition is as effective as actual competition in controlling market performance the efficient markets hypothesis broadly interpreted states that markets are workably competitive and that the market structure reflects differential efficiency not strategic behavior while one can construct many other hypotheses about potential competition these classifications

the aid effectiveness literature the sad results of 40 years of research abstract the aid effectiveness literature ael consists of empirical macroeconomic estimates of the effects of development aid by the end of 2004 it comprised 97 econometric studies of three families of related effects each family has been analyzed in a separate meta analysis the ael is an ideal subject for meta analysis as it uses only a few formally similar models to estimate the same underlying effects it is also an area with strong beliefs often generated by altruism when this whole literature is examined a clear pattern emerges after 40 years of development aid the preponderance of the evidence indicates that aid has not been effective we show that the distribution of results is significantly asymmetric reflecting the reluctance of the research community to publish negative results the dutch disease effect on exchange rates provides a plausible explanation for the observed aid ineffectiveness

empirical results of aid motivations australia s bilateral aid program abstract this paper briefly surveys the existing literature on the motivations of overseas aid the emphasis is on the two competing models of recipient need and donor interest and the paper estimates these two models using data for australian bilateral aid both the recipient need model and the donor interest model are supported by the econometric analysis this is in stark contrast to the results of other studies for large states such as the united states and the united kingdom these prior studies show no support for the recipient need model whereas the donor interest model is supported the atypical result for the australian bilateral aid program requires further analysis in terms of non nested hypotheses

why foreign economic assistance there is general agreement in the economics literature that resource flows among countries in response to market incentives enhance global economic efficiency and welfare in both rich and poor countries it has also been argued that in the presence of capital market imperfections the transfer of resources from developed country governments to the governments of developing countries on commercial terms either directly or through multilateral agencies can normally be expected to be welfare enhancing in both developed and developing countries 1 these arguments do not apply however to official development assistance that involves a substantial grant element two arguments have typically been used in support of transfers that include a grant component one set is based on the economic and strategic self interest of the donor country the second is based on the ethical or moral responsibility of the residents of wealthy countries toward the residents of poor countries both sets of arguments have been the subject of continuous challenge i argue in this article that neither the donor self interest nor the ethical responsibility argument can be rejected on logical or theoretical grounds i also assert that the empirical evidence in support of both the economic and the strategic self interest arguments is exceedingly weak the ethical responsibility arguments impose less burden on the empirical evidence but they are subject to continuous challenge by political theorists and moral philosophers donor self interest

on the delegation of aid implementation to multilateral agencies some multilateral agencies implement aid projects in a broad range of sectors with aid disbursements showing a strong overlap with those of bilateral donors the question then arises of why do bilateral donors delegate sizable shares of their aid to non specialized agencies for implementation this paper develops a game theoretic model to explain this puzzle donors delegate aid implementation to the multilateral agency ml to strengthen the policy selectivity of aid incentivizing policy improvements in recipient countries in turn improving aid s development effectiveness bilateral donors are better off delegating aid to ml even when they are purely altruistic but disagree on how aid should be distributed across recipients key for our result to hold is that ml searches some middle ground among disagreeing donors aid selectivity in terms of both policy and poverty emerges endogenously and is credible as it is the solution to ml s optimization problem moreover the model shows that if one sufficiently large donor is policy selective in its aid allocations there is no need for other donors to be policy selective the world bank s aid program for lower income countries the international development association ida is shown to fit the assumptions and predictions of the model specifically ida is a dominant donor in most of its recipient countries and is much more policy and poverty selective than bilateral aid donors view it as a public good and contribution more to it when bilateral aid is less selective potential threats to ida s role as a dominant policy selective donor include the emergence of nontraditional donors changes in voting shares and traditional donors increasing use of earmarked contributions

contestable markets an uprising in the theory of industry structure comment a situation traditionally identified as conducive to imperfect competition is when average costs decline and the cheapest scale of production is large relative to the size of the market however some of the more recent literature on industrial organization has emphasized a supposed distinction between fixed costs of production and sunk costs of production a point frequently made is that while the possibility of sunk costs can create genuine barriers to entry pure fixed costs per se do not inhibit competitive market performance this approach finds its logical extreme in the norm or abstraction of perfect contestability perfect contestability is essentially a theory of the polar case of frictionless entry and exit as william baumol stated a contestable market is one into which entry is absolutely free and exit is absolutely costless p 3 certainly this is the most reasonable interpretation of a situation where potential entrants feel free to disregard an incumbent s price response suppose every potential and actual producer has access to the same technology in a perfectly contestable market there are no set up or shut down losses the main result is that even with declining average costs of production the incumbent firm does not dare to post a price higher than average cost price above cost invites being undercut by a hit and run shadow entrant capable of producing at the same flow rate and at identical unit cost during just the briefest instant of time i argue that this line of reasoning is misleading perfect contestability gets around the problem of increasing returns only by in effect assuming it away a hit and run technology makes the firm behave as if it is competitive in a market precisely because the convexity preconditions for competition are de facto being met in that market this comment shows that strictly speaking there is no such thing as a pure fixed cost unless there are sunk costs located somewhere in the relevant production technology all costs are variable as a matter of formal theory you cannot have a range of decreasing average cost without sunk costs presumably there is also an approximation theorem which states that when sunk costs are close to being negligible then average production costs are practically nondecreasing perfect contestability holds approximately in a market only to the extent that production costs for the market are approximately nondecreasing my discussion will be restricted to the familiar case of a single well defined homogeneous fully divisible commodity while more general approaches are possible for the sake of simplicity the following definition is used the average cost function a c y t describes say the minimum cost per unit of output produced at a uniform flow rate y throughout the time interval 0 t especially in applications to industrial organization theory it is essential to remember that cost functions are not generally timeless and that writing ac as a function of y alone can be dangerously vague behind the free entry and exit of a hitand run technology in a perfectly contestable market is the abstraction of no sunk costs investments are fully reversible because nothing is lost in setting up or shutting down production

politics and the effectiveness of foreign aid abstract critics of foreign aid programs have long argued that poverty reflects government failure in this paper i test predictions for aid effectiveness based on an analytical framework that relates aid effectiveness to political regimes i find that aid does not significantly increase investment nor benefit the poor as measured by improvements in human development indicators but it does increase the size of government the impact of aid does not vary according to whether recipient governments are liberal democratic or highly repressive but liberal political regimes and democracies ceteris paribus have on average 30 lower infant mortality than the least free regimes this may be due to greater empowerment of the poor under liberal regimes even though the political elite continues to receive the benefits of aid programs an implication is that short term aid targeted to support new liberal regimes may be a more successful means of reducing poverty than current programs

strategic rate making in the context of dynamic ramsey pricing as a result of the public utilitie regulatory policies act of 1978 purpa state public utility commissions have begun to implement cost based rate setting procedures in order to rationalize energy choices made by utilities and utility customers this rationalization had been necessary in view of the increased competition characterizing the eletric utility industry taking these regulatory and competitive change as a point of departure we develop and implement an electricity rate setting model which is cost based which explicitly accounts for static and dynamic competitive pressures and which is welfare maximizing the model extends standard ramsey methods to include bothshort run andlong run price responses in the inverse elasticity rule we use the estimated model to evalute and design alternative rates our analysis takes a distincly strategic approach explicitly addressing competition from other fuels and the possibility of competitive bypass

more dollars than sense refining our knowledge of development finance using aiddata summary in this introductory essay to the special issue we introduce a new dataset of foreign assistance aiddata that covers more bilateral and multilateral donors and more types of aid than existing datasets while also improving project level information about the purposes and activities funded by aid we utilize that data to provide a brief overview of important trends in foreign aid contributors to this special issue draw on aiddata as well as other sources to analyze aid transparency new donors not previously described or analyzed aid allocation and aid effectiveness our recurring theme in this introductory essay is that aiddata and these initial academic projects refine rather than revolutionize our understanding of aid the database has added significant numbers of new projects dollar amounts donors and details about those projects though there is much more yet to add we worry that aid debates have been driven by too little information and that many claims are based on limited or very poor evidence rectifying these problems will not be instantaneous refining knowledge takes a lot of time and hard work the common feature of the papers in this special issue is their careful attention to nuance and detail in spite of what some recent authors have claimed aid is neither a simple solution nor a sufficient cause of most problems in developing countries its motivations distribution and effects are complex and shifting capturing this complexity requires detailed data careful thought and sophisticated methods that allow scholars to make conditional causal and descriptive inferences 2011 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

aid dispersion measurement in principle and practice summary excessive dispersion of development assistance has been high on the paris agenda on aid effectiveness however there is no agreement in the existing literature on how aid dispersion should be measured and few studies of the extent of the problem we argue for using the theil index for both recipients and donors this relative inequality measure has a major advantage it allows for a perfect decomposition into variation between and within entities exploiting this property we can rank official donors and recipients not only in terms of the total spread but also assess the contributions of geographic and sectoral dispersion we provide a detailed picture of developments along various dimensions globally as well as for countries income groups and regions over 1998 13 we further distinguish between bilateral and multilateral donors consistent with other studies using more limited samples we find little effect of the paris agenda overall aid is more fragmented in sub saharan africa and in the poorest countries globally as well as for most donor and recipient countries between variation is the main driver of the spread lending support to the geographic concentration policies many donor countries have adopted bilateral aid has been somewhat more dispersed than multilateral aid and in both cases the large number of donors controlling similar shares of total funds is a major driver of the total spread the latter suggests that concentration could also be achieved through a reduction of the number of actors on the donor side of the aid industry a perspective that previous studies using other measures have been unable to capture

are bilateral and multilateral aid for trade complementary using the first comprehensive estimates of ad valorem tariff equivalent bilateral trade costs spanning the time period 2002 10 we examine whether the aid for trade aft inflows reduce bilateral trade costs facing aid recipients if so we ask whether the trade costs reduction effects of aft from bilateral and multilateral sources are complementary by showing the extent to which the observed trade cost reduction effects of aft from bilateral multilateral sources correlate with the magnitudes of aft disbursements from multilateral bilateral sources we present plausible explanation for the cross country variations in the extent to which aft promotes trade flows our findings have thus important policy implications for shaping future discourses on the coordination of disbursements for enhancing the effectiveness of aft

electoral competition and politician turnover abstract in this paper we analyze the selection by opportunistic parties of the candidates who run for election we consider a setting with incomplete but symmetric information about the candidates abilities in which electoral campaigns provide voters with additional information about candidates parties care only about selecting an appropriate candidate to win the election while voters elect the best candidate conditional on their information we first argue that in order to defeat an established very good candidate of its rival a party may favor a new candidate with highly uncertain ability rather than an established good candidate next we establish that the discrepancy between the objective of parties and the objective of the electorate leads to inefficient conservatism in the selection of candidates i e each party keeps its incumbents too often from the voters viewpoint

estimating aid allocation criteria with panel data in 1990 the net amount of economic aid or official development assistance to all recipients from all multilateral and bilateral sources was about 62 billion an amount that exceeded the gdps of greece and portugal despite the size of this yearly transfer there has been no rigors modeling and estimation of the criteria by which it occurs as a result there is little agreement about the extent to which oda is allocated according to the needs of the recipient countries the purpose of this paper is to develop a rigorous theoretical model of oda allocation that can be used to provide consistent estimates of the importance of recipient needs copyright 1994 by royal economic society

proliferation and fragmentation transactions costs and the value of aid abstract the problem of the proliferation of the number of aid donors and aid channels continues to worsen it is widely and plausibly believed that this significantly reduces the value of aid by increasing direct and indirect transactions costs we contribute to the existing literature by a categorising the apparent adverse effects of proliferation b producing a reliable and fair indicator of the relative degree to which the main bilateral donors proliferate or concentrate their aid c giving some explanation of why some donors proliferate more than others d constructing a reliable measure of the extent to which recipients suffer from the problem of fragmentation in the sources of their aid and e demonstrating that the worst proliferators among the aid donors are especially likely to be suppliers of aid to recipients suffering most from fragmentation there are significant implications for aid policy

building or bypassing recipient country systems are donors defying the paris declaration the 2005 paris declaration on aid effectiveness sets targets for increased use by donors of recipient country systems for managing aid it also calls for donors to be more responsive to the quality of recipient country systems the optimal level of their use in terms of maximizing the development effectiveness of aid is believed to vary with their quality this study investigates the degree to which donors use of country systems is in fact positively related to their quality using indicators explicitly endorsed for this purpose by the paris declaration and covering the 2005 2010 period the results of these tests strongly confirm a positive and significant relationship and show it is robust to corrections for potential sample selection omitted variables or endogeneity bias the result holds even when estimates are informed only by variation over time within each donor recipient pair in use and quality of country systems moreover donor specific tests show that use of country systems varies positively with their quality for the vast majority of donors these findings contradict several other studies that claim there is no relation and imply that donors in this respect are failing to live up to their commitments under the paris declaration the author s interpretation of the available evidence on use of country systems is more favorable donors behavior over the measurement period is largely consistent with their commitments in this area in this respect at least donors appear to have modified their aid practices in ways that build rather than undermine administrative capacity and accountability in recipient country governments

contestability in a resource market with non convex costs consider an intertemporal resource market with n identical firms each managing an exhaustible resource deposit the extraction from which is governed by a u shaped average cost curve eswaran lewis and heaps 1983 elh show that such a market cannot have a competitive equilibrium in their comments on elh kimmel 1984 and mumy 1984 point out however that the elh result is driven by there being a small number of firms which is inconsistent with price taking behavior this provides a motivation for analyzing the situation considered by elh under alternative assumptions of market behavior in general perfect contestability applies to circumstances where perfect competition is impossible because economies of scale are present see baumol et al 1982 since the non convexities in elh are not caused by once and for all setup or shut down costs rather the flow of costs is assumed to be a non convex function of the flow of extraction replacing the assumption of price taking behavior with an assumption of ultra free entry 2 provides a potential means of restoring a market equilibrium in the present case contestability theory holds that the threat of competition by potential entrants can discipline the pricing behavior of the active firms however as pointed out by cairns 1991 footnote 9 a non active firm can be the source of this kind of discipline in an exhaustible resource market only if its remaining reserves are positive caution should therefore be exercised in applying contestability theory to a resource market in this note existence of an equilibrium in such an exhaustible resource market is shown partly by relying on the possibility of ultra free entry we

are there negative returns to aid the world bank report assessing aid assumes that an inflow of aid above a certain level starts to have negative effects in this analysis we empirically test this assumption we find evidence for negative returns to aid at high levels of aid inflows however the results are sensitive to both the countries included in the sample and model specification moreover the turning point above which aid starts to have a negative effect on growth seems to be much higher than assumed in the background calculations for assessing aid

aid supplies over time addressing heterogeneity trends and dynamics summary what determines how much foreign aid donors provide existing answers to this question point to a complex range of influences however the tasks of distinguishing between long and short run factors as well as differences between donors have not been adequately addressed taking advantage of data spanning nearly 50 years this paper uses panel cointegration techniques to consider these issues the analysis provides clear evidence for heterogeneity both between donors and over time bandwagon effects and a growing influence of security considerations in aid provision domestic macroeconomic shocks have a moderate but delayed effect on aid disbursements

aid policies and growth the authors of this paper use a new database on foreign aid to examine the relationships among foreign aid economic policies and growth of per capita gdp in panel growth regressions for 56 developing countries and 6 four year periods 1970 93 they find that the policies that have a great effect on growth are those related to fiscal surplus inflation and trade openness they construct an index for those three policies and have that index interact with foreign aid they have instruments for both aid and aid interacting with policies they find that aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal monetary and trade policies in the presence of poor policies aid has no positive effect on growth this result is robust in a variety of specifications which include or exclude middle income countries include or exclude outliers and treat policies as exogenous or endogenous they examine the determinants of policy and find no evidence that aid has systematically affected policies either for good or for ill they estimate an aid allocation equation and show that any tendency for aid to reward good policies has been overwhelmed by donors pursuit of their own strategic interests in a counterfactual they reallocate aid reduce the role of donor interests and increasing the importance of policy such a reallocation would have a large positive effect on developing countries growth rates

aid allocation through various official and private channels need merit and self interest as motives of german donors summary the previous literature largely ignores the heterogeneity of aid channels used by each single donor country we estimate tobit models to assess the relative importance of recipient need merit and self interest of donors for various channels of official and private german aid across a large sample of recipient countries in 2005 07 our findings underscore the need for a disaggregated analysis of aid allocation aid channels differ significantly in the extent to which need and merit are taken into account yet the german case does not reveal unambiguously superior aid channels

aid tying and donor fragmentation this study tests two opposing hypotheses about the impact of aid fragmentation on the practice of aid tying in one when a small number of donors dominate the aid market in a country they may exploit their monopoly power by tying more aid to purchases from contractors based in their own countries alternatively when donors have a larger share of the aid market they may have stronger incentives to maximize the development impact of their aid by tying less of it empirical tests strongly and consistently support the latter hypothesis the key finding that higher donor aid shares are associated with less aid tying is robust to recipient controls donor fixed effects and instrumental variables estimation when recipient countries are grouped by their scores on corruption perception indexes higher shares of aid are significantly related to lower aid tying only in the less corrupt sub sample this finding is consistent with the argument that aid tying can be an efficient response by donors when losses from corruption may rival or exceed losses from tying aid when aid tying is more costly as proxied by donor country size and income it is less prevalent aid tying is lower in the least developed countries consistent with the oecd development assistance committee s recommendation to its members

local housing supply and the impact of history and geography this paper considers the impact of existing land use patterns on housing supply price elasticities in local areas of england under existing planning policies the paper demonstrates that despite

aid fragmentation and effectiveness what do we really know summary aid fragmentation is widely recognized as being detrimental to development outcomes we reinvestigate the impact of fragmentation in the context of growth bureaucratic policy and education focusing on a number of conceptually different indicators of fragmentation and paying attention to potentially heterogeneous effects across countries sectors and channels of influence our systematic and detailed reexamination of existing empirical studies shows that this differentiation is crucial in some sectors such as primary education donor concentration or limiting donor numbers appear to be detrimental rather than beneficial for development outcomes in other areas we find the expected negative effect but only when we conceptualize fragmentation as a lack of lead donors too limited concentration rather than in terms of donor numbers in all cases sufficient initial administrative capacity in recipient countries prevents the negative and reinforces the positive effects of fragmentation this stresses the importance of questioning the sweeping conclusions drawn by much of the previous literature based on what we currently know generalizing judgments about the effect of aid fragmentation may be misleading

spatial housing economics a survey this introduction to the virtual special issue surveys the development of spatial housing economics from its roots in neoclassical theory through more recent developments in social interactions modelling and touching on the role of institutions path dependence and economic history the survey also points to some of the more promising future directions for the subject that are beginning to appear in the literature the survey covers elements of hedonic models spatial econometrics neighbourhood models housing market areas housing supply models of segregation migration housing tenure subnational house price modelling including the so called ripple effect and agent based models possible future directions are set in the context of a selection of recent papers that have appeared in urban studies nevertheless there are still important gaps in the literature that merit further attention arising at least partly from emerging policy problems these include more research on housing and biodiversity

contestability vs competition once more baumol willig and other advocates of contestability theory continue to urge the idea not only for its insights but also as a clear basis for many antitrust and regulatory decisions yet the limits of the theory remain the three key assumptions are extremely strict and two of them are in mutual conflict the theory is not robust to imperfections in order to displace effective competition with contestability baumol must adopt a sequence of implausible propositions which unfortunately have little analytical or empirical basis

aid flows and the international transfer problem in a structuralist north south model this paper analyzes the impact of increased aid flows from industrial to developing countries on growth in transferr ing and recipient countries one key variable in the analysis is the ter ms of trade which links the analysis to the classic transfer debate th e analysis is centered around policy simulations with a small structuralist general equilibrium model of north south interactions simulation exercises for a doubling of official development assistan ce up to the dac target of 0 7 percent of the gnp of the industrialized countries show the great sensitivity of the global adjustment proces ses to the way in which these transfers are financed the model results suggest that deficit financing under monetary constraints may trigge r a global recession and a secondary burden falls on the recipient countries in the form of a strong decline in their terms of trade tax financing or financing of the aid transfer through budget cuts can help to avoid the global recessionary effects and recipients may gai n from the aid transfer evidently the global economic environment an d macroeconomic policies in the industrialized countries are an import ant component in determining the effectiveness of aid to developing countries copyright 1993 by royal economic society

aid and growth regressions this paper examines the relationship between foreign aid and growth in real gdp per capita as it emerges from simple augmentations of popular cross country growth specifications it is shown that aid in all likelihood increases the growth rate and this result is not conditional on good policy there are however decreasing returns to aid and the estimated effectiveness of aid is highly sensitive to the choice of estimator and the set of control variables when investment and human capital are controlled for no positive effect of aid is found yet aid continues to impact on growth via investment we conclude by stressing the need for more theoretical work before this kind of cross country regressions are used for policy purposes

capitalising the value of free schools the impact of supply characteristics and uncertainty there has been a growing literature in both the us for example haurin and brasington 1996 and black 1999 and the uk for example gibbons machin 2003 that estimates the way in which school quality is capitalised into house prices cheshire and sheppard 1995 and 1999 estimated hedonic models in which the quality of the secondary school to which a household was assigned was a significant variable which provided evidence that secondary school quality was being capitalised into the price of houses in contrast gibbons and machin concluded that primary schools were more significant each of these analyses is predicated on the assumption that the value of local schools should be reflected in the value of houses we argue here that this is rather too simple we should expect variation in the capitalised price of a given school quality at either primary or secondary level according to the elasticity of supply of school quality in the local market the certainty with which that quality can be expected to be maintained over time and the suitability of the dwelling to accommodate children these factors will vary systematically between and perhaps within cities this paper explores the sources and the impact of such variations as well as the impact of model specification the results provide new evidence on the complex and subtle ways in which housing markets capitalise the value of local public goods such as school quality and perhaps most importantly suggest that this is highly non linear houses in the catchment areas of only the best state schools command substantial premiums but such capitalised values can be very substantial indeed

aid and performance a reassessment two visions of aid effectiveness and allocation are compared the first corresponding to the new aid paradigm argues that aid is only effective if domestic policies are appropriate the second in contrast argues that aid effectiveness depends on the external and climatic environment the worse this environment or the more vulnerable the recipient countries the greater the effectiveness of aid cross sectional econometric tests related to gdp growth on two 12 year pooled periods clearly favour the second view the two views can be reconciled through the principle of performance based aid allocation where performance is defined as outcomes adjusted for the impact of environmental factors performance can then be measured in several manners which are subject to comparison one approach would lead one to allocate more aid the worse the external environment is for a given policy and the better the policy is for a given environment

why barriers to entry are barriers to understanding this paper discusses and criticizes the usual definitions of barriers to entry the failure of the concept of barrier to entry to incorporate a time dimension means that it is a concept that is in need of additional embellishment in order to be useful in a practical problem or for antitrust or regulatory proceedings this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

can foreign aid reduce income inequality and poverty this paper s goal is to examine the effect of foreign aid on income inequality and poverty reduction for the period 1971 2002 since simple cross country regressions cannot be taken as true time series findings we focus on dynamic panel data techniques which allow accounting for potential simultaneity and heterogeneity problems we find some weak evidence that foreign aid is conducive to the improvement of the distribution of income when the quality of institutions is taken into account however this result is not robust this finding is consistent with recent empirical research on aid ineffectiveness in achieving economic growth or promoting democratic institutions

the impact of land use planning and tax subsidies on the supply and price of housing in britain this article presents new empirical estimates of the impact of two types of policy intervention tax subsidies and land use planning on the housing market in britain the estimates are derived from a set of models representing the demand and supply sides of the market for the new private housebuilding which include an explicit land supply element the models are fitted to cross sectional data at the inter urban local authority level and then employed in medium period simulations of alternative policies modelling at this level enables estimates to be made of the extent of variation between local markets in the elasticity of supply and also in the impacts of policy measures including the capitalisation of tax subsidies

the distribution of london residential property prices and the role of spatial lock in much of mainstream economic analysis assumes that markets adjust smoothly through prices to changes in economic conditions however this is not necessarily the case for local housing markets wh

aid allocation rules abstract this paper studies an aid allocation rule used by major development agencies and investigates optimal allocations when recipients are neoclassical economies undergoing transition dynamics when recipients face aid absorption constraints allocations that favor poorer recipients are not always optimal contrary to what is assumed in assessments of donor performance the most quantitatively significant factors that determine the optimal sensitivity to recipient characteristics are the generosity of the aid budget and the extent of absorption constraints in neoclassical recipients aid can only accelerate growth where there is already growth so the optimal rule places little weight on growth and optimality is largely a matter of balancing recipient need against absorption constraints

foreign aid and market liberalizing reform market oriented economic policies reflected in limited economic activity by government protection of private property rights sound monetary policy outward orientation regarding trade and efficient tax and regulatory policy have been strongly linked to faster rates of economic growth foreign aid is often provided in the belief that it encourages liberalizing reforms in these areas this paper analyzes the impact of aid on market liberalizing policy reform correcting for the possible endogeneity of aid results indicate that higher aid slowed reform over the 1980 2000 period as measured by a broad index of policies disaggregating policy into five areas aid is significantly linked to slower reform in some policy areas but not in others disaggregating by decade aid s adverse impact on policy reform is much more pronounced for the 1980s than for the 1990s

grants versus loans for development banks in recent years economists have increasingly debated whether multilateral development banks such as the world bank should switch from making subsidized loans to giving outright grants it is no small question the combined loans of the world bank group and brethren regional entities such as the asian and inter american development banks approach 300 billion their funds constitute a main channel through which rich country governments provide assistance to developing country governments in bulow and rogoff 1990 we first developed the case for a shift to outright grants we argued that under the status quo a vastly disproportionate share of aid goes to middle income countries via disguised interest subsidies rather than to the poorest countries we also argued that a shift to grants would protect donor banks from sometimes having to play a bad cop role when trying to collect net repayments rather than fully rolling over loans the meltzer commission international financial institution advisory commission 2000 report on government sponsored international lending institutions famously took a similar view supporters of the status quo often argue that development bank loans to middle income countries are in fact highly profitable and are essential for allowing institutions like the world bank to subsidize aid to poor countries we shall argue that the bank s profitability is an accounting artifice that greatly underestimates the risks of the bank s portfolio another argument for loans is that multilateral development banks have a superior enforcement technology that helps international debt markets to function more efficiently thus loans allow financially strapped governments including in middle income countries to borrow more than they could otherwise we will argue that this benefit too is an illusion in those cases when official lending does expand a developing country government s borrowing capacity it effectively enables the government to commit the country to repayment levels beyond that supported by domestic political consensus creating moral hazard for shortsighted rulers in theory better credit access to finance say public infrastructure projects can be highly beneficial in practice however the increased risk of debt crisis all too often outweighs any gain ordinary citizens might enjoy from the loans furthermore moral hazard on the part of lenders who may be able to induce rich countries into subsidizing the bailout of troubled middle income borrowers may mean that aggregate lending is excessive even if multilaterals merely displace equivalent private debt we do not argue for eliminating assistance to middle income countries on the contrary we would favor expanding aid in general albeit in far greater proportion to the world s poorest countries note that in principle any country with market access could use grant flows to help defray interest rate costs on loans if it so chose but development banks would never need to assume a bad cop role in enforcing debt

dancing to the donors tune policy choice in aid dependent countries current aid rhetoric emphasizes the selective allocation of otherwise unconditional funds in support of the recipients own plans in contrast to the old donor practice of bundling money and policies i show that when recipients have private information policies reflecting their preferences and knowledge might result in such a regime however generous transfers can also induce them to conform to the outcome oriented expectations of donors at the expense of lower aid impact such behaviour is consistent with an abundance of case study evidence moderate disagreements over what the optimal policy is could actually produce better results certain forms of both donor competition and coordination might also eliminate this distortion while a donor concern for need only removes incentives for aid seeking in the least needy countries in summary optimal aid policies are highly context specific and donors should thus concentrate their efforts to practise more informed selectivity

land use planning and the housing market a comparative review of the uk and the usa this paper provides a review of some of the key articles and research examining the relationship between planning regulation and its impact on the housing market in the uk and the us in both count

quality in contestable markets a historical problem the theory of contestable markets has made notable inroads into the traditional way of looking at markets with only a few producers but its relationship to the theory of monopolistic competition in general and the quality of goods in particular has not been explored in depth such a connection is suggested by a feature of contestable markets emphasized by william baumol in his presidential address baumol emphasizes the fact that an incumbent is always vulnerable to hit and run entry if he ever tries to exert his potential monopoly power 1

donor competition for aid impact and aid fragmentation we show that donors that maximize relative aid impact spread their budgets across many recipient countries in a unique nash equilibrium this aid fragmentation result is robust to the introduction of fixed costs even if they are improbably large in equilibrium smaller donors have less fragmented aid and behave better from an efficiency viewpoint we present evidence that our theoretical results are in line with cross country correlations our analysis has important policy implications first short of ending donors maximization of relative aid impact agreements to better coordinate aid allocations are not implementable second since policies to increase donor competition in terms of aid effectiveness risk reinforcing relativeness they may well backfire as any such reinforcement increases aid fragmentation

policy evaluation via composite indexes qualitative lessons from international transparency policy indexes summary international transparency policy indexes itpis help determine billions in investment and aid influence authoritative scholarship and shape policy choices are itpis valid yardsticks of transparency or do they encourage dissimulation most scholarship on index based evaluations focuses on concept indexes e g governance from quantitative approaches this paper presents qualitative insights about itpis in specific and policy indexes in general analyzing three measurement related pitfalls and proposing countermeasures most significantly it shows how indexes presuppose substitutability while policies contain nonsubstitutable necessary policy provisions this dilemma of ontological compatibility means that policies can rank favorably on indexes notwithstanding the absence of lynchpin policy provisions

bilateral donors and the age of the national interest what prospects for challenge by development agencies summary foreign aid agencies represent and champion global development priorities within a donor nation increasingly however these agencies sit within donor governments that are strongly committed to upholding the national interest through their development commitments this paper is concerned with how bilateral aid agencies manage this tension and how they might continue to serve the altruistic aims of development the main research question asks if autonomy or a combination of autonomies can improve a development agency s ability to defend the humanitarian imperative of development against normative pressures privileging the national interest by drawing on theories of autonomy within public management literatures it is possible to identify points of leverage for development agencies where spaces for autonomous preferences and actions remain as well as sources of limitation where such opportunities are considerably reduced six types of autonomy are examined across three nations widely perceived as strong performers as donors norway the uk and sweden the paper suggests that while structural autonomy is critical for preserving humanitarian motivations there are also unexplored opportunities within other autonomous spheres a multi dimensional examination of autonomy highlights the varying capacity that development agencies have to resist pressures to strongly nationalize the global development project

darlings and orphans interactions across donors in international aid we examine how bilateral aid flows of an individual donor to a recipient depend on aid flows from all other bilateral and multilateral donors to that recipient we thereby assess to what extent issues including donor coordination free riding selectivity specialization and common donor interests drive bilateral aid allocations we find that others bilateral flows lead to a significant increase in aid flows from a particular donor but primarily within a given year the effects are particularly pronounced for large donors and so called darling recipients overall the results suggest that herding is a dominant feature of aid inter relationships this article is protected by copyright all rights reserved

contestability a revisionist view many claims have been made about the significance of the contribution of contestability theory to industrial organizat ion this paper concludes that contestability theory leaves unanswere d questions about the identity of entrants and the source of their re sources a modification to the theory is proposed rather than as a h indrance to potential entry sunk costs are viewed as being of key si gnificance for the disciplining of oligopolists through potential ent ry with the proposed modification the analysis of the costs of mult iproduct firms may be more easily integrated with recent developments in industrial organization copyright 1988 by the london school of economics and political science

local taxation and urban development testing for the side effects of the italian property tax land is an essential yet limited natural resource its current unsustainable use asks for a better understanding of the main determinants of urban expansion a heuristic approach is used to analyze urban development in italy in particular the paper estimates an econometric model to test the impact of the italian property tax ici on the local authorities behavior and in particular on urban planning and development it tests whether its introduction has fostered rather than dampened construction activity the hypothesis put forward is that because of the concurrent market conditions the introduction of the tax has facilitated urban development the structure of the tax and the devolution process that began in the 90s induced local municipalities to adopt less tight accommodative urban policies to offset budgetary needs a more elastic urban policy reduces price volatility however its overall welfare effect is not clearly determined indeed ceteris paribus geographical areas with more elastic housing supply witness larger land consumption the land use changes we witnessed in the last decades could be the combined effect of financial and fiscal aspects if this is so careful attention should be given to the issue of whether leaving urban planning and the power to levy property taxes under the same jurisdiction

aid policies and growth comment in an extraordinarily influential paper craig burnside and david dollar 2000 p 847 find that aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal monetary and trade policies but has little effect in the presence of poor policies this finding has enormous policy implications the burnside and dollar 2000 henceforth bd result provides a role and strategy for foreign aid if aid stimulates growth only in countries with good policies this suggests that 1 aid can promote economic growth and 2 it is crucial that foreign aid be distributed selectively to countries that have adopted sound policies international aid agencies public policy makers and the press quickly recognized the importance of the bd findings this paper reassesses the links between aid policy and growth using more data the bd data end in 1993 we reconstruct the bd database from original sources and thus 1 add additional countries and observations to the bd data set because new information has become available since they conducted their analyses and 2 extend the data through 1997 thus using the bd methodology we reexamine whether aid influences growth in the presence of good policies given our focus on retesting bd we do not summarize the vast pre bd literature on aid and growth we just note that there was a long and inconclusive literature that was hampered by limited data availability debates about the mechanisms through which aid would affect growth and disagreements over econometric specification see gustav f papanek 1972 robert cassen 1986 paul mosley et al 1987 peter boone 1994 1996 and henrik hansen and finn tarp s 2000 review since bd found that aid boosts growth in good policy environments there have been a number of other papers reacting to their results including paul collier and jan dehn 2001 carljohan dalgaard and hansen 2001 patrick guillaumont and lisa chauvet 2001 hansen and tarp 2001 robert lensink and howard white 2001 and collier and dollar 2002 these papers conduct useful variations and extensions some of which had already figured in the pre bd literature such as introducing additional control variables using nonlinear specifications etc some of these papers confirm the message that aid only works in a good policy environment while others drive out the aid policy interaction term with other variables this literature has the usual limitations of choosing a specification without clear guidance from theory which often means there are more plausible specifications than there are data points in the sample we differentiate our paper from these others by not deviating from the bd specification thus we do not test the robustness of the results to an unlimited number of variations but instead maintain the bd methodology this paper conducts a very simple robustness check by adding new data that were unavailable to bd thus we expand the sample used over their time period and extend the data from 1993 to 1997 easterly department of economics new york university 269 mercer street new york ny 10003 center for global development and national bureau of economic research e mail william easterly nyu edu levine department of finance carlson school of management university of minnesota 321 19th avenue south minneapolis mn 55455 and national bureau of economic research e mail rlevine csom umn edu roodman center for global development 1776 massachusetts avenue nw washington dc 20036 e mail droodman cgdev org we are grateful to craig burnside for supplying data and assisting in the reconstruction of previous results without holding him responsible in any way for the work in this paper thanks also to francis ng and prarthna dayal for generous assistance with updating the sachs warner openness variable and to three anonymous referees craig burnside and henrik hansen for helpful comments 1 see for instance the world bank 1994 2001 2002 the u k department for international development 2000 president george w bush s speech march 16 2002 the announcement by the white house on creating the millennium challenge corporation white house 2002 as well as a washington post editorial february 9 2002 a financial times column by alan beattie march 11 2002 and the economist march 16 2002

aid quality and donor rankings this paper offers new measures of aid quality covering 38 bilateral and multilateral donors as well as new insights about the robustness and usefulness of such measures the 2005 paris declaration on aid effectiveness and the follow up 2008 accra agenda for action have focused attention on common donor practices that reduce the development impact of aid using 18 underlying indicators that capture these practices derived from the oecd dac s survey for monitoring the paris declaration the new aiddata database and the dac aid tables the authors construct an overall aid quality index and four coherently defined sub indexes on aid selectivity alignment harmonization and specialization compared with earlier indicators used in donor rankings this indicator set is more comprehensive and representative of the range of donor practices addressed in the paris declaration improving the validity reliability and robustness of rankings one of the innovations is to increase the validity of the aid quality indicators by adjusting for recipient characteristics donor aid volumes and other factors despite these improvements in data and methodology the authors caution against overinterpretation on overall indexes such as these alternative plausible assumptions regarding weights or the inclusion of additional indicators can still produce marked shifts in the ranking of some donors so that small differences in overall rankings are not meaningful moreover because the performance of some donors varies considerably across the four sub indexes these sub indexes may be more useful than the overall index in identifying donors relative strengths and weaknesses