Recent studies offer an ambiguous picture on the effectiveness of foreign aid in strengthening the export capacity of recipient countries. Moreover, the literature on aid for trade (AfT) has often neglected that exporters in the donor countries may be among the main beneficiaries. We hypothesize...

Die meisten afrikanischen Länder laufen Gefahr, die Millennium Development Goals weit zu verfehlen. Die Vereinten Nationen fordern deshalb, die Entwicklungshilfe massiv aufzustocken, und der Afrika-Aktionsplan der G8 verspricht eine Konzentration der Hilfe auf Afrika. Vor diesem Hintergrund...

Political proximity between donor and recipient governments may impair the effectiveness of aid by encouraging favoritism. By contrast, political misalignment between donor and recipient governments may render aid less effective by adding to transaction costs and giving rise to incentive...

NGOs could help scale up foreign aid efforts by mobilizing private donations. However, fundraising activities do not necessarily result in higher donations, and substitution effects between different sources of revenue may diminish the overall pool of NGOs’ resources. This paper examines the...

Aid flows continue to be volatile and unpredictable, even though it is widely accepted that this erodes the effectiveness of foreign aid. We argue that fragmented donor-recipient relationships, notably the large number of minor aid relations that tend to be associated with donors’ desire to...

This paper examines the long-run effect of foreign aid on income inequality for 21 recipient countries using panel cointegration techniques to control for omitted variable and endogeneity bias. We find that aid exerts an inequality increasing effect on income distribution

We investigate the importance of geo-strategic and commercial motives for the allocation of German aid to 138 countries over the 1973-2010 period. We find that geo-strategic and – less robustly – commercial motives matter. When we relate geo-strategic and commercial motives to the political...

We account for the competition for export markets among the donor countries of foreign aid by analyzing spatial dependence in aid allocation. We employ sector-specific aid data, distinguishing between first and second stage decisions on the selection of recipient countries and the amount of aid...

NGOs are widely perceived to raise their flag in humanitarian hot-spots with strong media presence in order to attract higher private donations. We assess this hypothesis by comparing the changes in donations between US-based NGOs with and without activities in the four countries most affected...