Major DAC donors are widely criticized for weak targeting of aid, selfish aid motives and insufficient coordination. The emergence of an increasing number of new donors may further complicate the coordination of international aid efforts. On the other hand, new donors (many of which were aid...

Using a new dataset for 41 German non-governmental organizations (NGOs), we analyze the allocation of NGO aid across recipient countries in a Tobit regression framework. By identifying for each NGO the degree of public refinancing, we address the largely unresolved issue of whether financial...

We investigate whether elected members of the United Nations Security Council receive favorable treatment from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), analyzing panel data on the level of conditionality attached to (a maximum of) 314 IMF arrangements with 101 countries over the period of 1992 to...

Inflows of remittances to Pakistan are being increasingly viewed as a relatively attractive source of external finance, one that can help to foster development and manage economic shocks. Remittances have become a major source of revenue, surpassing the volume of FDI and official development...

This study explores a basic idea in political economy: Trading money for political influence. Our focus is at the level of international institutions, where governments may exploit their influence in one organization to gain leverage over another. In particular, we consider the lending...

As is now well documented, aid is given for both political as well as economic reasons. The conventional wisdom is that politically-motivated aid is less effective in promoting developmental objectives. We examine the ex-post performance ratings of World Bank projects and generally find that...

We assess the determinants of the wide variation in the efficiency of foreign aid activities across US-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In particular, we analyze whether noncharitable expenditures for administration, management and fundraising depend on the intensity of competition...

Apart from scaling up foreign aid by NGOs, informed choices of private donors could also encourage an efficient and targeted use of NGO funds in international development cooperation. We assess the determinants of private donations across a large sample of US based NGOs with foreign aid...

This paper investigates the link between exporting and importing activities and firm performance using a rich dataset on Egyptian and Moroccan firms. We test the export premium, self-selection and learning-by-exporting hypotheses using a number of firm characteristics. Our analysis also includes...

Performance-based aid has been proposed as an alternative to the failed traditional approach whereby donors make aid conditional on the reform promises of recipient countries. However, hardly any empirical evidence exists on whether ex post rewards are effective in inducing reforms. We attempt...