Performance-based aid has been proposed as an alternative to the failed traditional approach whereby donors make aid conditional on the reform promises of recipient countries. However, hardly any empirical evidence exists on whether ex post rewards are effective in inducing reforms. We attempt...

Using enterprise data for the economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS, this study examines the effects of corruption on productivity. Corruption is defined as a “bribe tax” and is compared to another form of institutional inefficiency, which is often believed to be closely linked...

It is widely believed that foreign aid may help conflict-affected countries to recover after the settlement of conflicts. However, the available empirical evidence supporting this view largely neglects the heterogeneous nature of aid. Drawing on the conflict database of the Uppsala Conflict Data...

By tracking the changes in different margins of Theil indices during the period 1995-2015, we re-consider the question of whether bilateral and multilateral donors have targeted aid increasingly to particularly needy recipient countries with relatively good governance in order to improve the...

The question of whether aid recipient countries would benefit from stronger income effects if foreign donors provided higher quality aid has received scant attention so far. We make use of the ranking of donors by the Center for Global Development to compare the effects of quality-adjusted aid...

Almost half of the world's states provide bilateral development assistance. While previous research takes the set of donor countries as exogenous, this article is the first to explore the determinants of aid donorship. We hypothesize that democratic institutions reduce poor countries' likelihood...

Donor reactions to recent settlements of internal conflicts have been highly diverse, in terms of both overall aid and its sectoral composition. The allocation of post-conflict aid tends to be needs-based by favoring particularly poor countries. There is no conclusive evidence, however, that the...

In a report presented at the UN Conference on Financing for Development in March 2002, the World Bank claims that the effectiveness of its financial aid has improved substantially by targeting aid at poor developing countries pursuing sound economic policies. However, the World Bank's success...

The article criticizes the World Bank as overy optimistic concerning its ability to raise the effectiveness of aid by concentrating aid on countries with "good" policies. It is shown that aid flows to the main recipient regions yielded the highest correlation to growth when their magnitudes...

We raise the hypothesis that aid specifically targeted at economic infrastructure helps developing countries attract higher FDI inflows through improving their endowment with infrastructure in transportation, communication, energy and finance. By performing 3SLS estimations we explicitly account...