In this paper I discuss the effectiveness of foreign aid from a historical perspective. I show that foreign aid is a relatively new concept in economics, and I emphasize the role of exchange rate policies in the foreign aid controversies of the 1970s through 1990s. I show that in the early 1980s...

Although a large literature argues that European settlement outside of Europe shaped institutional, educational, technological, cultural, and economic outcomes, researchers have been unable to directly assess these predictions because of an absence of data on colonial European settlement. In...