Donors who try to impose policy conditionality on countries receiving their aid commonly face confflicting incentives between using aid to induce income-increasing reforms and using aid to assist low-income countries: this confflict can lead to a time-consistency problem. This paper o¤ers a...

This paper draws further attention to the importance of taking into account off-budget aid when estimating the degree of foreign aid fungibility.  It does so by re-evaluating the results of a recent, influential paper which concluded that health aid is fully fungible in the long run.  Allowing...

A windfall of natural resource revenue (or foreign aid) faces government with choices of how to manage public debt, investment, and the distribution of funds for consumption, particularly if the windfall is both anticipated and temporary.  Standard policy advice follows the permanent income...

This paper investigates the role of aid in mitigating the adverse effects of commodity export price shocks on growth in commodity-dependent countries.  Using a large cross-country dataset, we find that negative shocks matter for short-term growth, while the ex ante risk of shocks does not seem...

This paper takes a fresh look at the issue of foreign aid fungibility.  Unlike the bulk of existing empirical studies, I employ panel data that contain information on the specific purpose for which aid is given.  This allows me to link aid given for education and healt purposes to recipient...

Post-conflict situations face a high risk of reversion to conflict. We investigate the effect of military expenditure by the government during the first decade post-conflict on the risk of reversion. We contrast two theories as to the likely effects. In one, military spending deters conflict by...

This paper examines the (non) equivalance between aid flows and trade preferences as alternative forms of donor assistance in the presence of learning-by-doing externalities in recipient country export production. Using a two-period model based on vanWijnbergen (1985), in which the productivity...

We review two proposals for debt forgiveness; the Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative (HIPC) and the Jubilee 2000 Coalition Initiative (J2K). We then consider the workhorse model of debt forgiveness (Krugman 1988). We show that the workhorse model solution is a sub-optimal contract, where...

We review two proposals for debt forgiveness; the Highly Indebted Poor Country Initiative (HIPC) and the Jubilee 2000 Coalition Initiative (J2K). We then consider the workhorse model of debt forgiveness (Krugman 1988). We show that the workhorse model solution is a sub-optimal contract, where...