We investigate the effects of short-term political motivations on the effectiveness of foreign aid. Donor countries’ political motives might reduce the effectiveness of conditionality, channel aid to inferior projects, reduce the aid bureaucracy’s effort, and change the power structure in...

This paper brings the aid effectiveness debate to the sub-national level. We hypothesize the non-robust results regarding the effects of aid on development in the previous literature to arise due to the effects of aid being insufficiently large to measurably affect aggregate outcomes. Using...

International cooperation is generally driven by a desire to offset a negative spillover imposed by other countries or to help governments to overcome domestic political economy constraints that impede the adoption of welfare enhancing policy changes. In principle, both conditions are satisfied...

Charitable donations by private individuals and firms can help fund the Millennium Development Goals. What are the prospects for increasing donations for international development, whether from small-scale donors, the super-rich (as in the recent gifts by Bill Gates and Ted Turner), or the...

In this Paper we focus on the question: Will the HIPC debt reduction program help in the transformation of the development assistance business and change the rules of the ‘debt game’ in Africa? We concentrate on the donor and official creditor side, by exploring how the growing debt of...

This Paper discusses the challenges confronting developing countries seeking to overcome discrimination in world trade rules and policies. The major sources of discrimination in both developed and developing countries in the areas of market access opportunities and WTO disciplines are briefly...

This Paper analyses what actions could be taken in the context of the WTO Doha negotiations to assist countries to benefit from deeper trade integration. It discusses the policy agenda that confronts many developing countries and identifies a number of focal points that could be used both as...

We study the relationship between participation in free trade agreements (FTAs) and the sustainability of democracy. Our model shows that FTAs can critically reduce the incentive of authoritarian groups to seek power by destroying protectionist rents, thus making democracies last longer. This...

According to the Washington Consensus, developing countries’ growth would benefit from a reduction in tariffs and other barriers to trade. But a backlash against this view now suggests that trade policies have little or no impact on growth. If "getting policies right" is wrong or infeasible,...

This Paper studies the effect of knowledge diffusion on the incentives for developed countries’ (DC) firms to undertake costly transfer of production knowledge of an input to their developing countries’ (LDC) suppliers whose costs of production vary inversely with their technological effort....