The paper examines empirically the proposition that aid to poor countries is detrimental for external competitiveness, giving rise to Dutch disease type effects. At the aggregate level, aid is found to have a positive effect on growth of labour productivity. A sectoral decomposition shows that...

It continues to be heavily disputed whether foreign aid promotes economic growth in developing countries. In most cross-country regressions, aid is considered effective only if it shifts recipient countries to a significantly higher and sustainable growth path. We apply an alternative approach...

This paper explores whether one of the most important U.S. policies towards Africa of the past few decades achieved its desired result. In 2000, the United States dropped trade restrictions on a broad list of products through the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA). Since the Act was...

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 is a contribution to the literature on aid and growth. Despite an extensive existing empirical literature in this area, studies have not paid much attention to the importance of transmission mechanisms in determining the influence of aid inflows on growth rates. In other words,...