This paper critically reviews Assessing Aid (World Bank, 1998), focussing on Chapter 3, which looks at public sector aspects of aid, specifically the issue of aid fungibility. Whilst Assessing Aid's focus on public sector aspects of aid is highly appropriate, it is based on a partial review of...

The international donor community has grave concerns about the effectiveness of aid to countries it classifies as 'fragile states'. The impact of aid on growth and poverty reduction and the ability to efficiently absorb additional inflows is thought to be significantly lower in these countries...

Understanding the development effects of official aid is crucial to building a better bridge between research and policy. This paper reviews the current evidence regarding the impact of aid on growth and poverty reduction, and develops a new narrative. In the light of this narrative, the paper...

This Policy Arena examines some of the development challenges faced by SIDS. It brings together a collection of papers arising from the United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER) project [Fragility and Development]. These investigations were...

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) give aid to Africa a new emphasis. Yet aid flows to Africa have trended downward over the last decade, and as a consequence more Africans now live in poverty. This is especially true of Sub-Saharan Africa. Any progress towards the main MDG target of...

This paper empirically models aid allocation to four African countries-Egypt, Kenya, Morocco and Tanzania-using 1968-1999 time series data. The econometric method employed allows for the joint determination of aid to these countries and for recipient-specific coefficients. It is hypothesised...

This paper surveys five decades of empirical research on the macroeconomic impact of aid, looking mainly at studies examining the link between aid and growth. It argues that studies dating until the late 1990s produced either contradictory or inconclusive results. Aid either worked, or it...

This paper examines inter-country inequality in indicators of human well-being. It is primarily concerned with inequality in two gender-related, composite indicators of development levels proposed: the Gender-related Development Index (GDI) and the Gender Empowerment Measure (GEM). A number of...

This paper analyses the relationship between public sector borrowing and foreign development aid. It is concerned specifically with the public sector borrowing requirement net of aid, questioning the assumption that aid and this type of borrowing are substitutes for one another. After looking at...

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