With the use of comparable data from seven West African capitals, we attempt to assess the rationale behind development policies targeting high rates of school enrolment through the prism of allocation of labour and returns to skills across the formal and informal sectors. We find that people...

Within the last decades, the share of government aid in overall external financial flows to developing countries has decreased. It is estimated that between 75 and 85% of all current financial flows to developing countries derive from a variety of private sources, including remittances,...

The typical identification strategy in aid effectiveness studies assumes donor motives do not influence the impact of aid on growth. We call this homogeneity assumption into question, first constructing a model in which donor motives matter and then testing the assumption empirically. -- Aid ;...

This paper examines fungibility as a possible explanation for the "missing link" between foreign aid and economic growth. The composition of aid plays a crucial role in determining the composition of government spending and, consequently, the magnitude of fungibility and its impact on growth....

As is now well documented, aid is given for both political as well as economic reasons. The conventional wisdom is that politically-motivated aid is less effective in promoting developmental objectives. We examine the ex-post performance ratings of World Bank projects and generally find that...

Niger is well known in international media as one of the world's poorest countries, struggling with chronic structural hunger and malnutrition. What is less well known to many is that Niger also hosts the fourth largest uranium production in the world. Export values totaled over 348 million...