The empirical literature explaining the driving forces behind the flows of development aid consists of (at least) 166 studies. One factor that has been analyzed in 30 of these studies is growth in the recipient country. A priori the effect may as well be positive as negative. This is an...

The effect on aid allocation of the income level and population size in the recipient country is analyzed. The data show that both variables have a significant and robust negative effect, but they explain only a small part of the variation. The main thrust of the paper is a meta-analysis of the...

Foreign aid is given for many purposes and different intentions, yet most studies treat aid flows as a unitary concept. This paper uses factor analysis to separate aid flows into different types. The main types can be interpreted as aid for economic purposes, social purposes, and reconstruction;...

Our study, Doucouliagos and Paldam (2008), has recently been critically discussed by Mekasha and Tarp (2011). In this paper we show that contrary to what they state, their study validates our basic analysis: Both papers confirm that the literature has shown that aid is of little economic...

The authors have previously surveyed the AEL, aid (empirical) effectiveness literature, using the technique of meta-analysis. We reached the result that the small positive effect of aid on growth found in the average study is mostly a publication selection bias. This present study concentrates...

This note deals with a paradox: A literature growing exponentially in spite of the fact that it keeps finding the same result. We draw upon the findings of 106 empirical studies, of which 32 appeared in the last 4 years, to examine whether development aid generates economic growth. The studies...

The recent literature on the aid-growth relation discusses two competing models: The Good Policy Model, where the key feature is policy times aid, and the Medicine Model, where the key feature is aid squared. Both have been reached on a sample of about 1/3 of the available data. We present a...

The AEL consists of empirical macro studies of the effects of development aid. At the end of 2004 it had reached 97 studies of three families, which we have summarized in one study each using meta-analysis. Studies of the effect on investments show that they rise by 1/3 of the aid – the rest...

The AEL (aid effectiveness literature) studies the effect of development aid using econome¬ trics on macro data. It contains about 100 papers of which a third analyzes conditional models where aid effectiveness depends upon z, so that aid only works for a certain range of the variable. The key...

Aid flows are included into the standard cross-country catch-up relation. Robust¬ness of the result is tested by changing time periods and by adding extra variables. The main results are: Absolute conver¬gence and absolute aid effec¬ti¬ve¬ness are both rejected. While conditional...