We form an index of these three measures. For example, consistently good performers would be Botswana or Indonesia, and poor performers would be Tanzania or Zambia before 1993. Our analysis has been conducted both across countries and over time. Our results are particularly strong for the 41 low-income countries in the sample. Among developing countries, 2.0 percent per capita growth is a good performance.
Sound policies are, in and of themselves, good for growth.
If we look at the developing countries with poor policies, though, we find virtually no per capita growth for either those receiving small amounts of aid or those receiving large amounts. It is the fact that some countries have received large amounts of aid for decades and yet have shown no growth that has given aid a bad reputation. What has often been missed by observers, however, is that there are aid recipients with sound policies and that this group of countries has fared very well. Examples of countries in our sample that have received large amounts of aid and had good economic policies in the early 1990s are Bolivia, El Salvador, Ghana, Honduras, and Mali. There are, of course, influences other than policies and aid on a country's growth.