A substantial amount of aid to developing countries is given to the government, or goes through the budget, meaning it should have an impact on government fiscal behaviour (particularly on government spending). The few existing cross-country empirical studies on the effects of aid on government...

How can the impact of aid be estimated in the presence of fungibility? And how far does fungibility reduce its benefits? These questions are analyzed in a context where a donor wants to target its efforts on a specific sector and specific geographic areas. A traditional...

This paper examines historically the World Bank's twin features: lending to developing economies to achieve tangible results and advocating specific development policies. Section 1 provides some conceptual underpinnings for the view that an effective state is essential for development. It asks...

Two findings have been common in the literature on the impact of foreign aid on public sector fiscal behaviour in developing countries. The first is that aid "sticks" to higher levels of recipient government expenditure, with aggregate expenditure often rising by more than the value of the aid...

It is clear from the implications of growth theory that the impact of aid depends on how it affects savings, investment and government behaviour. In respect of low-income countries, which are the principal aid recipients and the economies for which the issue of the impact of aid on growth is...