Economic adjustment and reform programs, including those supported by international financial institutions (IFIs), must cope with informational asymmetries and special interest politics. This presents a particularly serious issue when IFIs make structural economic reforms a condition for...

We study how 22 donors allocate their bilateral aid among 147 recipient countries over the 1970- 2004 period to investigate whether changes in the international aid architecture?at the international and country level?have led to changes in behavior. We find that after the fall of the Berlin...

When donors and recipients have different preferences over budgetary allocations, conditionality helps the implementation of donor-financed poverty reduction programs. However, if donors cannot perfectly monitor all recipients'' actions, conditionality entails an inefficient allocation of...

This paper studies the spending and absorption of aid in PRGF-supported programs, verifies whether the use aid is programmed to be smoothed over time, and analyzes how considerations about macroeconomic stability influence the programmed use of aid. It finds that PRGF-supported programs allow...

Uganda''s market-friendly development strategy and poverty reduction agenda have attracted large financial inflows, including aid. During 2000-02, concerns about a possible aid-induced Dutch disease were heightened by widening macroeconomic imbalances and an upward trend in the real effective...

What role does China play in Africa''s development? What drives China''s increasing economic involvement in the continent? This paper attempts to provide a quantified assessment of China''s multifaceted influence as market, donor, financer and investor, and contractor and builder. Though in the...

Empirical studies suggest that trade reform has a positive effect on employment and income for the poor; however, there are winners and losers. If the transitional costs of trade liberalization fall disproportionately on the poor, trade reform can be designed to mitigate these effects. This...

International financial assistance (loans and grants) can potentially raise recipients'' welfare in two ways, by affecting a direct resource transfer and by facilitating efficiency-enhancing reforms. In practice, barriers to reform limit the potential of assistance to deliver these two...

Although various factors point to a more arduous and longer transition in Russia than in Eastern Europe, the broad policy approach should be similar. A necessary condition for effective macroeconomic stabilization is the imposition of hard budget constraints on enterprises. Financial assistance...