The procyclicality of fiscal policy that is prevalent in developing countries and emerging markets is well known. Its explanation is less clear. Recently, social inequality and the combination of corruption and democracy have been suggested as alternatives to the traditional explanation of these...

What happens if HIPC debt relief resources are not additional? We seek to answer this question by quantifying the impact of debt service payments and aid flows in cross- country growth and investment regressions . Based on the regressions we assess the likely impact of debt relief with and...

During recent years, new doubts about the effectiveness of international aid have emerged. One of the arguments employed to justify this sceptical view is that aid can hinder tax effort in developing countries. Nevertheless, empirical research on the aid-tax nexus is inconclusive and it shows...

The link between foreign aid and economic growth remains a controversial issue in the literature, and a large share of the disagreement could be explained by differences in the data employed. Using GDP data from three different versions of the Penn World Table and the World Development...

This paper investigates the intra-household impact of an expansion in employment opportunities for women in a dual labor market, when the informal sector functions as a gateway to the formal sector. We use a variant of the Harris-Todaro framework with two-period overlapping generations to model...