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

ngos in bangladesh activities resources and governance summary this paper reports results from one of the first large nationally representative surveys of non governmental organizations ngos in a developing country the ngo sector in bangladesh is highly organized and relatively homogeneous most ngos utilize a branch and headquarters structure in which branches have limited autonomy from headquarters at the branch level most ngos in the country whether big or small focus on credit services derive more of their income from fees for services than from grants rely on salaried rather than voluntary staff keep detailed financial accounts that are externally audited and hire middle class college educated men as managers the convergence to a modal institutional form probably is the result of the persuasive power of ideas sociological pressures toward acculturation and conformity as well as material incentives

how aid targets votes the impact of electoral incentives on foreign aid distribution despite allegations that foreign aid promotes corruption and patronage little is known about how recipient governments electoral incentives influence aid spending this article proposes a distributional politics model of aid spending in which governments use their informational advantages over donors in order to allocate a disproportionate share of aid to electorally strategic supporters allowing governments to translate aid into votes to evaluate this argument the author codes data on the spatial distribution of multilateral donor projects in kenya from 1992 to 2010 and shows that kenyan governments have consistently influenced the aid allocation process in favor of copartisan and coethnic voters a bias that holds for each of kenya s last three regimes he confirms that aid distribution increases incumbent vote share this evidence suggests that electoral motivations play a significant role in aid allocation and that distributional politics may help explain the gap between donor intentions and outcomes

adoption of an imf programme and debt rescheduling an empirical analysis the existence of an empirical relationship between the adoption of an imf programme and the concession of a debt rescheduling by commercial and official creditors is tested using a bivariate probit model if countries who have arrangements with the imf are more likely than others to obtain a rescheduling of their external debt we could conclude that the adoption of an imf programme could work as a sort of signal of a country s good willingness which is thus rewarded with the debt relief the results confirm the existence of a significant effect of the adoption of an imf programme on the subsequent concession of a debt rescheduling by creditors

competing models of international lending activity abstract four competing models of the world bank s lending to developing countries are constructed and econometrically estimated by pooled time series and cross section data the analysis suggests that a model combining economic and political determinants performs best besides per capita income inflation balance of payment and budget deficit external debt and past growth political determinants such as the capitalist climate or political instability are also important as well as a recipient country s former status as a colony or dominion this politico economic model is successfully used to forecast the distribution of ibrd loans and ida credits among the developing countries

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

human rights treaty ratification of aid receiving countries this paper studies the decision to ratify human rights treaties hrt at the united nations we present new empirical evidence that sheds light on who raties when and why controlling for the quality of domestic human rights institutions high levels of predetermined hrt participation relative to other aid recipients has a signicant positive eect on a country s foreign aid receipts suggesting that aid donors use treaty participation as a criterion to allocate foreign aid surprisingly though we nd that high levels of hrt participation precipitates a decline in the quality of domestic human rights institutions taken together with the result that donors reward treaty participation with foreign aid this suggests that using foreign aid as an incentive for treaty participation has indirect negative consequences for real human rights inconsistent with the traditional view that aid donors have a positive preference for human rights practices in developing countries we show however that the treaty participation of other aid recipients has a strong and positive eect on domestic human rights institutions that more than osets the negative eects

on the empirics of foreign aid and growth the present paper re examines the effectiveness of foreign aid theoretically and empirically using a standard olg model we show that aid inflows will in general affect long run productivity the size and direction of the impact may depend on policies deep structural characteristics and the size of the inflow the empirical analysis investigates these possibilities overall we find that aid has been effective in spurring growth but the magnitude of the effect depends on climate related circumstances finally we argue that the collier dollar allocation rule should be seriously reconsidered by donor agencies if aid effectiveness is related to climate the usefulness of foreign aid in promoting growth in developing countries has been an area of controversy ever since rosenstein rodan in 1943 advocated for aid to eastern and south eastern europe browsing through successive editions of a leading textbook in development economics provides a telling illustration of how the confidence in aid effectiveness dwindled over the years in the first edition of leading issues in economic development meier 1964 dedicated a full 18 page section to the issue of foreign aid he started out asking how much aid by the time of the sixth edition meier 1995 the treatment of foreign aid had been cut into half and the questions in focus were why official assistance and does aid work in the 2000 edition meier and rauch 2000 foreign aid is not even listed in the index

what are the key drivers of mac curves a partial equilibrium modelling approach for the uk marginal abatement cost mac curves are widely used for the assessment of costs related to co2 emissions reduction in environmental economics as well as domestic and international climate policy several meta analyses and model comparisons have previously been performed that aim to identify the causes for the wide range of mac curves most of these concentrate on general equilibrium models with a focus on aspects such as specific model type and technology learning while other important aspects remain almost unconsidered including the availability of abatement technologies and level of discount rates this paper addresses the influence of several key parameters on mac curves for the united kingdom and the year 2030 a technology rich energy system model uk markal is used to derive the mac curves the results of this study show that mac curves are robust even to extreme fossil fuel price changes while uncertainty around the choice of the discount rate the availability of key abatement technologies and the demand level were singled out as the most important influencing factors by using a different model type and studying a wider range of influencing factors this paper contributes to the debate on the sensitivity of mac curves

determinants of the levels and distribution of pl 480 food aid 1955 1979 abstract this paper reports the results of statistical tests of hypotheses related to a number of debates surrounding the determinants of the levels and distribution of us food aid the statistical results supported the following hypotheses 1 pl 480 food aid is influenced by the need of the recipient country 2 pl 480 food aid is tied to political and military concerns of the us 3 pl 480 food aid is influenced by the political party occupying the white house 4 pl 480 food aid and us commercial sales of agricultural commodities are substitutes and 5 pl 480 food aid is inversely related to a recipient s foreign exchange holdings

coding error or statistical embellishment the political economy of reporting climate aid to benefit from a wide spread public support for climate policy aid agencies strive to show the climate relevance of their development activities using project level aid data and country level political data for 21 dac donors from 1995 to 2007 we test whether this may lead to politically motivated misreporting through keyword search in individual project descriptions and complementary hand coding we assess all aid activities for their actual climate change related content and thereby construct our most relevant control variables econometric results reveal that indeed project coding is influenced systematically by the donor governments ideological orientation as well as by national voters environmental preferences

state responses to fiscal crises the effects of budgetary institutions and politics this paper explores the dynamics of state taxes and spending during the late 1980s when regional economic downturns and increased expenditure demands led to substantial state budget deficits more restrictive state fiscal institutions such as no deficit carryover rules and tax and expenditure limitations are correlated with more rapid fiscal adjustment to unexpected deficits political factors are also important when a single party controls the state house and the governorship deficit adjustment is much faster than when party control is divided in gubernatorial election years tax increases and spending cuts are both significantly smaller than at other times

the domestic determinants of us food aid policy abstract this study presents empirical analysis of us food aid flows as evidence of the strong and stable relationship between commodity producer interests and policy makers during a 35 yr period whereas most foreign aid research centers on the distribution of aid among recipient countries this study focuses on the determinants of the supply of food aid made available by the donor country i conduct time series regression analysis of total us food aid shipments as well as separate analyses of two key commodities wheat and rice several key findings emerge 1 there is a consistent relationship between commodity producer interests and us food aid policy 2 there is a strong relationship between commodity stocks and food aid shipments especially during the years when stocks were the greatest 3 us food aid policy making is highly incremental these findings taken together with the lack of a strong relationship between grain production in poor countries and us food aid shipments belie official rhetoric emphasizing the growing humanitarian objectives of the program over time in the case of rice i find a strong relationship between aid flows and us involvement in the vietnam war

aid with blinkers environmental governance of uranium mining in niger summary the role of development cooperation in fostering improved environmental governance of extractive industries in african countries exposed to the expanding global uranium frontier remains ambiguous with primary data this paper demonstrates how foreign aid to niger has ignored grievances on grave environmental impacts and rampant institutional failures while a crisis discourse on desertification and food insecurity diverts attention from geopolitical interests in mineral wealth we argue that aid delivery remains insufficient to address structural deficiencies cemented by decades of investment friendly politics of mining and conclude that domestic reforms must be backed by stronger transnational accountability mechanisms to overcome corporate impunity

who pays for public employee health costs abstract we analyze the incidence of public employee health benefits because these benefits are negotiated through the political process relevant labor market institutions deviate significantly from the competitive private sector benchmark empirically we find that roughly 15 percent of the cost of recent benefit growth was passed onto school district employees through reductions in wages and salaries strong teachers unions were associated with relatively strong linkages between benefit growth and growth in total compensation our analysis is consistent with the view that the costs of public workers benefits are difficult to monitor contributing to benefit oriented and often under funded compensation schemes

economic potential of energy efficient retrofitting in the swiss residential building sector the effects of policy instruments and energy price expectations the aim of this paper is to analyse the profitability of energy efficient retrofit investments in the swiss residential building sector from the house owner s perspective different energy price expectations policy instruments such as subsidies income tax deduction and a carbon tax as well as potential future cost degression of energy efficiency measures were taken into account the discounted cash flow method was used for the investment analysis of different retrofit packages applied to a model building scheduled for renovation i e a single family house constructed between 1948 and 1975 the results show that present swiss policy instruments push investments for energy efficient retrofitting to profitability cost degression has a minor significance for investment profitability however the most relevant factor for the investment analysis is the expected energy price expecting a future fuel oil price at the level of 2005 efficiency investments are close to profitability even without policy support if higher energy prices were expected energy efficient retrofitting would be an attractive investment opportunity

a public choice approach to international organization the purpose of this paper has been to develop a positive theory of international organization which can supplement the conventional normative theory used as a positive theory the conventional approach draws much of its plausibility from the fact that it relies on the reasons given by the decision makers and reported in the media and on the lofty objections stated in the charters of international agencies the public choice approach by its very nature is precluded from accepting such evidence in some respects it must appear dismal and perhaps cynical it is a positive theory which tries to explain but just as the conventional normative theory tends also to be used as a positive theory our positive theory is likely to have normative implications as well it does not imply that international organization is generally undesirable but it can be used to emphasize the advantages of decentralized policy making and to warn against a naive internationalism which welcomes international agreements for their own sake regardless of what is being agreed upon international organization can be and is abused and the cause is not an occasional lack of virtue among politicians but a systematic built in tendency toward collusion at the expense of the citizens such collusion is not only undesirable in itself there is also the danger that it discredits and crowds out unambiguously desirable forms of international cooperation agreements to remove non market obstacles to market interdependence in the field of international trade and capital movements

delegation to international organizations agency theory and world bank environmental reform current international relations theory struggles to explain both the autonomy and transformation of international organizations ios previous theories either fail to account for any io behavior that deviates from the interests of member states or neglect the role of member states in reforming io institutions and behavior we propose an agency theory of ios that can fill these gaps while also addressing two persistent problems in the study of ios common agency and long delegation chains our model explains slippage between member states interests and io behavior but also suggests institutional mechanisms staff selection monitoring procedural checks and contracts through which states can rein in errant ios we evaluate this argument by examining multiple institutional reforms and lending patterns at the world bank from 1980 to 2000

federal budget policy with an aging population and persistently low interest rates some observers have argued that the projections for high and rising debt pose a grave threat to the country s economic future and give the government less fiscal space to respond to recessions or other unexpected developments so they urge significant changes in tax or spending policies to reduce federal borrowing in stark contrast others have noted that interest rates on long term federal debt are extremely low and have argued that such persistently low interest rates justify additional federal borrowing and investment at least for the short and medium term we analyze this controversy focusing on two main issues the aging of the us population and interest rates on us government debt it is generally understood that these factors play an important role in the projected path of the us debt to gdp ratio what is less recognized is that these changes also have implications for the appropriate level of us debt we argue that many though not all of the factors that may be contributing to the historically low level of interest rates imply that both federal debt and federal investment should be substantially larger than they would be otherwise in conclusion although significant policy changes to reduce federal budget deficits ultimately will be needed they do not have to be implemented right away instead the focus of federal budget policy over the coming decade should be to increase federal investment while enacting changes in federal spending and taxes that will reduce deficits gradually over time

the political economy of imf lending in africa why has imf lending achieved such poor results in africa is it because the fund imposes the wrong conditions or because it fails to enforce them analysis of monthly data on 53 african countries from 1990 to 2000 shows that the imf s loans for reform contract lacks credibility because donor countries intervene to prevent rigorous enforcement countries that have influence with developed country patrons as measured by u s foreign aid membership in postcolonial international institutions and voting profiles in the un are subject to less rigorous enforcement shorter program suspensions they have more frequent program suspensions because they violate their conditions more often the imf will have to become more independent in order to become an effective champion of reform

the fiscal stress arising from state and local retiree health obligations a major factor weighing down the long term finances of state and local governments is the obligation to fund retiree benefits while state and local government pension obligations have been analyzed in great detail much less attention has been paid to the costs of the other major retiree benefit provided by these governments retiree health insurance the first portion of the paper uses the information contained in the annual actuarial reports for public retiree health plans to reverse engineer the cash flows underlying the liabilities given in the report obtaining the cash flows allows us to construct liability estimates which are consistent across governments in terms of the discount rate actuarial method and assumptions concerning medical cost inflation and mortality we find that the total unfunded accrued liability of state and local governments for the provision of retiree health care exceeds 1 trillion or about of total state and local government revenue relative to pension obligations discounted at the same rate we find that unfunded retiree health care liabilities are the size of unfunded pension obligations we also find that using assumptions concerning the growth in health care costs that are arguably more realistic than those employed by most states actually reduces the size of the liability in most cases pushing in the opposite direction we find that using plausibly more realistic mortality assumptions increases the size of liability the second portion of the paper places retiree health care obligations into context by examining the budget pressures associated with retiree health on a continuing largely pay as you go basis we find that much of the projected increase in retiree health obligations as a share of revenue is the result of health care cost growth on average states could put their retiree health obligations into long run fiscal balance by contributing an additional percent of total revenue toward the benefit each year there is however wide variation across the states with the majority of states requiring little in the way of additional financing but some states requiring a significantly larger increase

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

what do nongovernmental organizations do nongovernmental organizations are one group of players who are active in the efforts of international development and increasing the welfare of poor people in poor countries nongovernmental organizations are largely staffed by altruistic employees and volunteers working towards ideological rather than financial ends their founders are often intense creative individuals who sometimes come up with a new product to deliver or a better way to deliver existing goods and services they are funded by donors many of them poor or anonymous yet these attributes should not be unfamiliar to economists development ngos like domestic nonprofits can be understood in the framework of not for profit contracting it is easy to conjure up a glowing vision of how the efforts of ngos could focus on problem solving without getting bogged down in corruption or bureaucracy but the strengths of the ngo model have some corresponding weaknesses in agenda setting decision making and resource allocation we highlight three factors in explaining the increased presence of ngos in the last few decades a trend towards more outsourcing of government services new ventures by would be not for profit entrepreneurs and the increasing professionalization of existing ngos

an assessment of household electricity load curves and corresponding co2 marginal abatement cost curves for gujarat state india gujarat a large industrialized state in india consumed 67 twh of electricity in 2009 10 besides experiencing a 4 5 demand supply short fall residential sector accounted for 15 of the total electricity consumption we conducted load research survey across 21 cities and towns of the state to estimate residential electricity load curves share of appliances by type and usage patterns for all types of household appliances at utility geographic appliance income and end use levels the results indicate that a large scope exists for penetration of energy efficient devices in residential sector marginal abatement cost mac curves for electricity and co2 were generated to analyze relative attractiveness of energy efficient appliance options results indicate that up to 7 9 twh of electricity can be saved per year with 6 7 mt co2 emissions mitigation at negative or very low co2 prices of us 10 t co2 despite such options existing their penetration is not realized due to myriad barriers such as financial institutional or awareness and therefore cannot be taken as baseline options for co2 emission mitigation regimes

how effectively does multilateral food aid respond to fluctuating needs abstract this paper tests the targeting efficacy of multilateral food aid at the level of nation states exploring whether it stabilizes food availability in recipient economies flows most to those with the greatest need or both we find that unlike bilateral flows from the united states under pl 480 multilateral food aid distribution by the world food programme flows countercyclically thereby stabilizing food availability in recipient economies wfp flows also exhibit significant progressivity at the regional level helping to resolve international inequalities in food availability per capita

project analysis and the world bank the world bank has been the single most important international institution to promote the practice of professional project appraisal over the past five decades although at times conventional project lending has been a relatively small share of total lending by the world bank key members of the bank staff have continued to be active in improving the understanding of what creates success or failure in the performance of development projects their influence on governments and practitioners in this field has been significant and widespread this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

supervision and performance the case of world bank projects abstract this paper explores the impact of donor supervision on development project performance using data from world bank funded projects maximum likelihood estimation of a restricted ordered probit function finds that early supervision has a positive impact on performance given the size of world bank funded projects gains from increasing supervision far outweigh the costs the results provide evidence of an institutional bias toward lending at the expense of increased development impact

explaining global patterns of international aid for linked biodiversity conservation and development summary there is little systematic knowledge about the nature extent and trends of international aid for projects that link biodiversity conservation and development goals this study uses a new dataset to analyze spatial and temporal patterns of such aid globally over the past three decades results reveal significant donor selectivity in aid allocation though linked conservation and development aid comprised more than two thirds of all biodiversity related assistance biodiversity aid generally was directed to biodiversity rich well governed countries but countries able to exert greater political leverage secured more linked aid than aid targeted to conservation without a stated development objective

residential energy consumption in urban china a decomposition analysis abstract residential energy consumption rec is the second largest energy use category 10 in china and urban residents account for 63 of the rec understanding the underlying drivers of variations of urban rec thus helps to identify challenges and opportunities and provide advices for future policy measures this paper applies the lmdi method to a decomposition of china s urban rec during the period of 1998 2007 at disaggregated product activity level using data collected from a wide range of sources our results have shown an extensive structure change towards a more energy intensive household consumption structure as well as an intensive structure change towards high quality and cleaner energy such as electricity oil and natural gas which reflects a changing lifestyle and consumption mode in pursuit of a higher level of comfort convenience and environmental protection we have also found that china s price reforms in the energy sector have contributed to a reduction of rec while scale factors including increased urban population and income levels have played a key role in the rapid growth of rec we suggest that further deregulation in energy prices and regulatory as well as voluntary energy efficiency and conservation policies in the residential sector should be promoted

explaining institutional change policy areas outside options and the bretton woods institutions i propose and test a theoretical framework that explains institutional change in international relations like firms in markets international institutions are affected by the underlying characteristics of their policy areas some policy areas are prone to produce institutions facing relatively little competition limiting the outside options of member states and impeding redistributive change in comparison institutions facing severe competition will quickly reflect changes in underlying state interests and power to test the theory empirically i exploit common features of the bretton woods institutions the international monetary fund and world bank to isolate the effect of variation in policy area characteristics the empirical tests show that despite having identical membership and internal rules bargaining outcomes in the bretton woods institutions have diverged sharply and in accordance with the theory

foreign aid fertility and human capital accumulation this paper analyses the effect of foreign aid on population growth and human capital accumulation consistent with empirical evidence from sub saharan africa the model shows that foreign aid can work against its stated goal of alleviating poverty and promoting growth humanitarian aid fosters population growth and adversely affects the recipients incentive to invest in human capital the analysis suggests that foreign aid may lock a recipient economy in a low equilibrium trap

did aid promote democracy in africa the role of technical assistance in africa s transitions did foreign aid impede or catalyze democratization in africa in the 1990s we argue that after the cold war donors increased their use of technical assistance in aid packages improving their monitoring capacity and thus reducing autocrats ability to use aid for patronage to remain in power autocrats responded by conceding political rights to their opponents from legalizing opposition parties to staging elections we test our theory with panel data for all sub saharan african countries while other factors played pivotal roles in africa s political liberalization we find technical assistance helps to explain the timing and extent of africa s democratization

model projections for household energy use in india energy use in developing countries is heterogeneous across households present day global energy models are mostly too aggregate to account for this heterogeneity here a bottom up model for residential energy use that starts from key dynamic concepts on energy use in developing countries is presented and applied to india energy use and fuel choice is determined for five end use functions cooking water heating space heating lighting and appliances and for five different income quintiles in rural and urban areas the paper specifically explores the consequences of different assumptions for income distribution and rural electrification on residential sector energy use and co2 emissions finding that results are clearly sensitive to variations in these parameters as a result of population and economic growth total indian residential energy use is expected to increase by around 65 75 in 2050 compared to 2005 but residential carbon emissions may increase by up to 9 10 times the 2005 level while a more equal income distribution and rural electrification enhance the transition to commercial fuels and reduce poverty there is a trade off in terms of higher co2 emissions via increased electricity use

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

does economic analysis improve the quality of foreign assistance the world bank undertakes an annual expenditure of around 60 million on country specific economic analysis and advice for its member developing countries what is the impact of this economic and sector work on the quality of world bank lending it will be useful to know whether past analytical work has generated measurable economic benefits that will justify its continued provision in an environment of increasingly scarce resources this article sets out an idealized model of decision making in which a country manager makes a broad allocation of resources between lending services and economic and sector work given that decision the task manager for each project makes project specific decisions with respect to the allocation of resources between preparation and supervision the analysis indicates that economic and sector work has a significant positive impact on the quality of world bank loans the results provide clear evidence of underinvestment in economic and sector work and the analysis shows that resources can be switched from preparation and supervision to economic and sector work to the benefit of both the quality of programs and level of disbursements

dodging adverse selection how donor type and governance condition aid s effects on school enrollment summary we employ aiddata to test the effects of primary education aid on school enrollment we argue that the problem of adverse selection complicates both the allocation and the effectiveness of aid we hypothesize that bilateral donors ought to have greater freedom to condition aid on recipient governance quality than multilateral donors which are often bound by institutional rules to provide aid more impartially compared to their multilateral counterparts bilateral donors may have advantages in overcoming adverse selection resulting in bilateral aid s boosting enrollments to a greater degree aiddata s extensive coverage of multilateral aid enables this analysis for up to 100 low and low middle income countries from 1995 to 2008 latent growth regression analysis suggests that compared to multilateral donors bilateral donors indeed condition their primary education aid on recipient control of corruption and that bilateral aid is significantly related to improved enrollments

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

imf lending programs participation and impact abstract participation in imf programs has been an option that more and more developing countries have exercised in recent years in this paper a detailed analysis of such participation over the period 1976 1986 provides a number of insights into the motivations for and the macroeconomic effects of such participation participation is driven by a combination of past performance present external influences and sluggish adjustment of developing countries the ability to predict which countries will participate in the imf program is quite good with nearly 90 percent of variation in such choices accounted for by the explanatory variables employed increased participation has as contemporaneous effects a reduction in economic growth and domestic investment and an improvement in the current account lagged effects of increased participation on economic growth and domestic investment are positive and in most estimates quantitatively greater than the contemporaneous effects there is also evidence of significantly lower public investment an increased budget surplus and real depreciation of the exchange rate with increased participation results for domestic credit creation and government current expenditure although they have a sign consistent with more austere policy cannot be shown to be significantly different from those not participating

the macroeconomic impact of development aid a critical survey the early literature explained aid s macroeconomic impact in the context of the dual gap model showing a clear link between aid and growth many now believe that the empirical evidence shows there to be no such relationship this paper critically reviews the different theoretical perspectives the dual gap model the savings debate recipient fiscal response and aid as dutch disease and the empirical debates on aid savings and growth the basis for denying a relationship between aid and growth is shown to be weak though more recent areas of research offer promising directions for future work

keeping a low profile what determines the allocation of aid by non governmental organizations ngos play an important role in international development cooperation but the allocation of ngo aid has rarely been mapped let alone explained based on a representative dataset for 61 important ngos from various oecd countries we analyze the targeting of ngo aid across a large number of recipient countries by jointly considering major determinants of ngo aid in a multivariate regression framework while our results show that ngos are more active in the neediest countries we reject the hypothesis that ngos complement official aid through engaging in so called difficult institutional environments rather they tend to replicate the location choices of official backdonors moreover ngos follow other ngos so that aid gets clustered finally ngos select recipient countries with common traits related to religion or colonial history taken together our findings suggest that ngos keep a low profile rather than distinguishing themselves from other donors and trying to excel under risky conditions

impact of large scale energy efficiency programs on utility finances and consumer tariffs in india abstract the objective of this paper is to analyze the effect on utility finances and consumer tariffs of implementing utility funded demand side energy efficiency ee programs in india we use the state of delhi as a case study we estimate that by 2015 the electric utilities in delhi can potentially save nearly 14 of total sales we examine the impacts on utility finances and consumer tariffs by developing scenarios that account for variations in the following factors a incentive mechanisms for mitigating the financial risk of utilities b whether utilities fund the ee programs only partially c whether utilities sell the conserved electricity into spot markets and d the level of power shortages utilities are facing we find that average consumer tariff would increase by 2 2 although consumers participating in ee programs benefit from reduction in their electricity consumption while utility incentive mechanisms can mitigate utilities risk of losing long run returns they cannot address the risk of consistently negative cash flow in case of power shortages the cash flow risk is amplified reaching up to 57 of utilities annual returns and is very sensitive to marginal tariffs of consumers facing power shortages we conclude by proposing solutions to mitigate utility risks

chasing success health sector aid and mortality summary as many cases studies show successful public health measures are being implemented in many places around the globe and country level mortality has fallen significantly in recent decades in all but a few countries are the two linked does development assistance for health dah improve on balance recipient countries mortality trajectory using a new data source containing dah on 96 high mortality countries the regression analysis shows no effect of dah on mortality other types of aid including water development also have no effect economic growth on the other hand has a strong negative effect on mortality these findings confirm and build upon recent work by williamson 2008 and are shown to be robust to a variety of sensitivity analyses and alternative model specifications and estimation methods this analysis also shows that the effectiveness of dah has not increased over time even as the level of that funding has increased fourfold though spending on infectious diseases and family planning may have caused small reductions in mortality furthermore even though it is encouraging that dah has tended to go where the need is highest it also goes to states that have experienced the greatest mortality reductions in the recent past in other words dah appears to be following success rather than causing it

ground truthing chinese development finance in africa field evidence from south africa and uganda abstracta new methodology tracking underreported financial flows tuff leverages open source information on development finance by non transparent non western donors if such open source methods prove to be valid and reliable they can enhance our understanding of the causes and consequences of development finance from non transparent donors including but not limited to china but open source methods face charges of inaccuracy in this study we create and field test a replicable ground truthing methodology to verify update and improve open source data with in person interviews and site visits in uganda and south africa ground truthing generally reveals close agreement between open source data and answers to protocol questions from informants with official roles in the chinese funded projects our findings suggest that open source data collection while limited in knowable ways can provide a stronger empirical foundation for research on development finance

the impact of foreign aid allocation on access to social services in sub saharan africa the case of water and sanitation summary the sustainable development target of ensuring access to water and sanitation for all by 2030 has far reaching implications for the achievement of the other sdgs however achieving this target remains a major challenge for sub saharan africa and the ability of governments in the region to expand access is constrained by limited financial resources this paper investigates whether targeting foreign aid to the water and sanitation sector can help achieve the goal of expanding access to water and sanitation services in sub saharan africa the analysis is based on panel data estimation techniques controlling for country specific effects and potential endogeneity of regressors the econometric results suggest that increased aid targeted to the supply of water and sanitation is associated with increased access to these services although the relationship is non linear the evidence in this study makes an important contribution to the scholarly debate on aid effectiveness it also has important practical implications for aid policy specifically it suggests that in addition to scaling up aid disbursements to sub saharan african countries donors need to increase aid allocation to water and sanitation as well as other areas where the region lags behind there is also a need to identify structural constraints that may limit access to water and sanitation and utilize foreign aid so as to alleviate these constraints

the political economy of conditionality an empirical analysis of world bank loan disbursements abstract traditional aid conditionality has been attacked as ineffective in part because aid agencies notably the world bank often fail to enforce conditions this pattern undermines the credibility of conditionality weakening incentives to implement policy reforms the standard critique attributes this time inconsistency to bureaucratic factors within the aid agency such as pressure to lend defensive lending or short sighted altruism pressure from powerful donors provides another potential explanation for lax enforcement this paper presents an empirical analysis of the political economy of conditionality in international organizations using the case of the world bank and the united states the analysis examines panel data on world bank disbursements to 97 countries receiving structural adjustment loans between 1984 and 2005 using un voting as an indicator of alignment with the u s the paper presents evidence that world bank structural adjustment loan disbursements are less dependent on macroeconomic performance in countries aligned with the united states

effective aid how democracy allows development aid to improve the quality of life abstract research into foreign aid has mostly focused on its ability to affect economic i e gdp per capita growth conclusions have been mixed i consider aid s effectiveness differently by its ability to improve quality of life i find that though aid does not affect quality of life in the aggregate it is effective when combined with democracy and ineffective and possibly harmful in autocracies the results suggest that aid would be more effective if it were combined with efforts to encourage democratization

additionality or diversion food aid to eastern europe and the former soviet republics and the implications for developing countries abstract substantial flows of assistance to eastern europe and the former soviet republics fsrs since 1989 have coincided with stagnating flows of official development assistance to developing countries raising concerns about the possible diversion of resources to the former from the latter these concerns are examined empirically for food aid which formed an important component of initial assistance to the region of eastern europe and the fsr using a supply based predictor model measuring diversion in terms of the difference between actual and forecast levels of food aid flows the model indicates that european union eu food aid including commission and member state actions largely involved additional resources there was however progressively greater diversion of us food aid from developing countries the findings are supported by a qualitative examination of the budgetary practices of the us administration and the european commission the two largest providers in financing their food aid to eastern europe and the fsr globally the combination of statistical and budgetary evidence suggests that between 10 12 million tons of cereals food aid or about 20 of shipments was diverted from developing countries to the region between 1989 1990 and 1993 1994

aid effectiveness opening the black box this paper examines the causality chain linking aid flows to development outcomes it argues that many of the questions policymakers and economists would like data to answer simply cannot be answered due to the complexity and noise along links in the chain and the problem of attribution it then examines what is known about aid effectiveness along different links in the causality chain finally it turns to recent trends in the way aid is delivered and the new model that appears to be emerging

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

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

locating foreign aid commitments in response to political violence following a recent trend towards disaggregation in studies of foreign aid and political violence we evaluate the determinants of foreign aid sub nationally we focus our attention upon political violence as a key subnational determinant of aid commitments and argue that donors commit aid to areas with recent political violence in the hope of ameliorating need and bolstering stability this being the case however we contend not all areas experiencing violence are equally likely to receive aid commitments this is because potential donors are faced with a dilemma balancing risk and reward that leads them to question whether they can effectively deliver aid to areas under conditions of extreme violence we test these two hypotheses and provide confirmation for them in the context of bilateral aid commitments to local areas within sub saharan african states experiencing civil war between 1990 and 2007

the role of governance in determining foreign aid flow composition summary we hypothesize that selective donors will use types of aid over which they have more control when providing assistance to poorly governed countries we use an original classification of project purpose codes in the aiddata dataset to categorize aid flows from the period 2004 to 2010 results from fixed effect and compositional data models provide evidence of selectivity in terms of overall aid flows a tradeoff between technical assistance and programmatic lending and a tradeoff between social sector and infrastructure projects

does food aid stabilize food availability this paper explores the empirical relationship between u s food aid flows per capita and nonconcessional food availability per capita in pl 480 recipient economies the evidence suggests pl 480 while modestly progressive in its distribution is if anything procyclical in recipient economies food aid fails to stabilize food availability both increased domestic food production i e agricultural development and commercial trade appear more effective than food aid in advancing food security objectives through the stabilization of food availability per capita in low income economies this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item

humanitarian aid fertility and economic growth this paper examines the effect of humanitarian aid on fertility and economic growth in an overlapping generations model where health status in adulthood depends on health in childhood adult agents allocate their time to work leisure and childrearing activities humanitarian aid influences the probability of survival to adulthood health in childhood and the time that adults allocate to childrearing giving rise to an ambiguous effect on both fertility and growth an empirical investigation for the period 1973 2007 suggests that humanitarian aid has on average a zero effect on the rates of fertility and of per capita output growth

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

the anarchy of numbers aid development and cross country empirics the recent literature contains many stories of how foreign aid affects economic growth aid raises growth in countries with good policies or with difficult economic environments or outside the tropics or on average but with diminishing returns the diversity of the results suggests that many are fragile seven important aid growth papers are tested for robustness using 14 minimally arbitrary tests deriving mainly from differences among the studies themselves this approach investigates the importance of potentially arbitrary specification choices while minimizing the arbitrariness in testing choices all of the results appear fragile especially to sample expansion

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

the applicability of marginal abatement cost approach a comprehensive review abstract the marginal abatement cost mac methodology is widely used in climate change policies policy makers rely on mac to assess feasible strategies and related costs to achieve emission reduction goals this paper introduces a variety of mac methodologies aiming at solving diverse problems which utilizes various calculable logic thus producing different results and implications this study applies a mind mapping method to capture differentiation of mac methods and systematically classify mac methodologies the applicability path analysis was proposed based on principles such as stakeholder type decision making objectives cost concept strategy mode and information scope our goal is to assess the applicability of different methodologies to reduce misuse by policy makers and to serve as a guide for subsequent research which might prompt and lead to the derivation of more consequential results in future studies the results of this study suggest that the complex method is not always better than the simplified method because policy makers are required to select the appropriate method according to the type of information needed it may even be suggested that mac could be reliable by ranking relative value of options compared with baseline rather than focusing on the absolute value of individual measures

business cycle fluctuations large macroeconomic shocks and development aid abstract we examine the cyclical properties of development aid using bilateral data for 22 donors and 113 recipients during 1970 2005 we find that bilateral aid flows are on average procyclical with respect to the business cycle in both donor and recipient countries while aid outlays contract sharply during severe downturns in donor countries they rise steeply when aid receiving countries experience large adverse shocks our findings suggest that development aid may play an important cushioning role in developing countries but only during times of severe macroeconomic stress our results are robust to alternate definitions of aid flows specifications and estimation techniques

global horse trading imf loans for votes in the united nations security council we investigate whether temporary members of the united nations security council receive favorable treatment from the international monetary fund imf using panel data for 197 countries over the period from 1951 to 2004 our results indicate a robust positive relationship between temporary security council membership and participation in imf programs even after accounting for economic political and country specific factors there is also evidence that security council membership reduces the number of conditions included in imf programs imf loans seem to be a mechanism by which the major shareholders of the fund can win favor with voting members of the security council

us food aid and civil conflict we study the effect of us food aid on conflict in recipient countries our analysis exploits time variation in food aid shipments due to changes in us wheat production and cross sectional variation in a country s tendency to receive any us food aid according to our estimates an increase in us food aid increases the incidence and duration of civil conflicts but has no robust effect on interstate conflicts or the onset of civil conflicts we also provide suggestive evidence that the effects are most pronounced in countries with a recent history of civil conflict jel d74 f35 o17 o19 q11 q18 we are unable to determine whether our aid helps or hinders one or more parties to the conflict it is clear that the losses particularly looted assets constitutes a serious barrier to the efficient and effective provision of assistance and can contribute to the war economy this raises a serious challenge for the humanitarian community can humanitarians be accused of fueling or prolonging the conflict in these two countries medecins sans frontieres amsterdam 1

aid allocation and poverty reduction the authors derive a poverty efficient allocation of aid and compare it with actual aid allocations they build the poverty efficient allocation in two stages first they use new world bank ratings of 20 different aspects of national policy to establish the current relationship between aid policies and growth onto that they add a mapping from growth to poverty reduction which reflects the level and distribution of income they compare the effects of using headcount and poverty gap measures of poverty they find the actual allocation of aid to be radically different from the poverty efficient allocation in the efficient allocation for a given of poverty aid tapers in with policy reform in the actual allocation aid tapers out with reform in the efficient allocation aid is targeted disproportionately to countries with severe poverty and adequate polices the type of country where 74 percent of the world s poor live in the actual allocation such countries receive a much smaller share of aid 56 percent than their share of the world s poor with the present allocation aid is effective in sustainably lifting about 30 million people a year out of absolute poverty with a poverty efficient allocation this would increase to about 80 million people even with political constraints introduced to keep allocations for india and china constant poverty reduction would increase to about 60 million reallocating aid is politically difficult but it may be considerably less difficult than quadrupling aid budgets which is what the authors estimate would be necessary to achieve the same impact on poverty reduction with existing aid allocations

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

too close for comfort the impact of official aid on nongovernmental organizations abstract in promoting a new policy agenda bilateral and multilateral donor agencies are keen to finance nongovernmental organisations ngos and grassroots organizations gros on the grounds of their economic efficiency and contribution to good governance this paper reviews the impact of this trend on ngo gro programming performance legitimacy and accountability if finds that much of the case for emphasizing the role of ngos gros rests on ideological grounds rather than empirical verification in addition though the evidence is inconclusive there are signs that greater dependence on official funding may compromise ngo gro performance in key areas distort accountability and weaken legitimacy

aid and growth what does the cross country evidence really show abstract we examine the effects of aid on growth in cross sectional and panel data after correcting for the possible bias that poorer or stronger growth may draw aid contributions to recipient co

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

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

foreign aid and domestic politics voting in congress and the allocation of usaid contracts across congressional districts this paper investigates the relationship between congressional support for foreign aid and the distribution of united states agency for international development usaid contract spending across congressional districts within the united states the extent to which such a relationship matters has become increasingly important in recent years as the end of the cold war and the advent of the republican controlled congress have eroded the traditional base of support for foreign aid we develop a model to illustrate how the distribution of contract spending could be used to increase support for foreign aid but at the expense of development impact in effect trading quality for quantity data on domestic foreign aid contract spending and votes in the 104th congress house of representatives allow us to test whether the geographic distribution of usaid contract spending within the united states is consistent with a systematic attempt to build support for foreign aid in congress econometric results provide little evidence of such attempts apparently because voting on this issue is insensitive to the distribution of contract spending

energy efficiency in india assessing the policy regimes and their impacts in the recent years india has emerged as one of the fast growing economies of the world necessitating equally rapid increase in modern energy consumption with an imminent global climate change threat india will have difficulties in continuing with this rising energy use levels towards achieving high economic growth it will have to follow an energy efficient pathway in attaining this goal in this context an attempt is made to present india s achievements on the energy efficiency front by tracing the evolution of policies and their impacts the results indicate that india has made substantial progress in improving energy efficiency which is evident from the reductions achieved in energy intensities of gdp to the tune of 88 during 1980 2007 similar reductions have been observed both with respect to overall indian economy and the major sectors of the economy in terms of energy intensity of gdp india occupies a relatively high position of nine among the top 30 energy consuming countries of the world c 2009 elsevier ltd all rights reserved

is aid oil an analysis of whether africa can absorb more aid summary this paper considers whether africa can absorb a doubling of aid if oil revenues provide a natural experiment the results are disappointing far from being transformational they have been markedly less successful than aid one implication is that the delivery modalities of aid though heavily criticized have substantially added value the paper discusses which modalities may have been most useful unfortunately aid appears to be subject to diminishing returns so that doubling aid through conventional modalities would not double its impact the paper concludes by considering innovations in aid modalities which might offset diminishing returns