The article criticizes the World Bank as overy optimistic concerning its ability to raise the effectiveness of aid by concentrating aid on countries with "good" policies. It is shown that aid flows to the main recipient regions yielded the highest correlation to growth when their magnitudes...

In a report presented at the UN Conference on Financing for Development in March 2002, the World Bank claims that the effectiveness of its financial aid has improved substantially by targeting aid at poor developing countries pursuing sound economic policies. However, the World Bank's success...

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...

The increasing importance of donor countries operating outside of the OECD's Development Assistance Committee (DAC) challenges the existing international aid architecture. In particular, non-DAC donors are suspected to provide aid solely based on self-interest without caring about recipients'...

Comparing the emigration rates of countries at different stages of economic development, an inverse u-shape emerges. Although merely based on cross-sectional evidence, the “migration hump” is often treated as a causal relationship. Since the peak is located at rather high per capita incomes...

We examine the role of local need and various distortions in the design and implementation of United Nations flash appeal triggered in response to the destructive 2015 Nepal earthquake. Specifically, we investigate the extent to which the allocation of this humanitarian assistance follows...

Little is known about foreign aid provided by private donors. This paper contributes to closing this research gap by comparing the allocation of private humanitarian aid to that of official humanitarian aid awarded to 140 recipient countries over the 2000-2016 period. We construct a new database...