In the wake of the current financial and economic crises, the economies of sub-Saharan Africa find themselves squeezed between likely reductions in official development assistance and the pressing challenge to eradicate poverty. Public expenditure allocation to the social sector and to public...

This study addresses the macroeconomic effect of foreign aid on the factors of growth. Specifically, we examine the effects of foreign aid on capital investment (human capital, physical capital) in sub-Saharan Africa. Our methodological approach evaluates the effect of disaggregate aid (aid for...

This study provides an analysis of the aid-private capital flows-growth nexus for Ghana. It is premised on the argument that Ghana's new status as a middle income country plus the start of oil production is bound to result in a reduction in ODA inflows in the long term. However in the short to...

The strong interdependence between the developed and developing worlds surfaced with the recent economic downturn. Due to the global character of the economy, the downturn affected not only the North but also the South. In addition, the Official Development Assistance (ODA) is subject to a...

This paper examines the impact of foreign aid on economic growth in Sierra Leone, a country where an empirical econometric study on aid effectiveness is yet to exist. Using a triangulation of approaches involving the ARDL bounds test approach and the Johansen maximum likelihood approach to...

In a recent article, Nowak-Lehmann, Dreher, Herzer, Klasen, and Martínez-Zarzoso (2012) (henceforth NDHKM) conclude that foreign aid has not had a significant effect on income, based on evidence from panel data potentially covering 131 countries over the period 1960-2006. The present study...

I discuss how aid can support growth in small, isolated economies. Small markets frustrate scale economies and competition. Combined with high transport costs, essential inputs become prohibitively expensive. Breaking the coordination problem requires pioneering investment. Since this generates...

Donors of foreign aid increasingly claim to consider gender inequality in the recipient countries to be a serious concern. While aid specifically to promote gender equality receives only a tiny share of aid budgets, allocations to education, health, and civil society projects could be affected...

Studies of aid effectiveness abound in the literature, often with opposing conclusions. Since most time-series studies use data from the exact same publicly available data bases, our claim here is that such differences in results must be due to the use of different econometric models and...

This paper reviews both the literature on aid volatility and also adds to that literature. In general, the focus of this literature has been on the volatility of overall aid, while we focus more on the volatility of the individual aid sectors, e.g., education aid. In doing this, detailed use is...