How can the impact of aid be estimated in the presence of fungibility? And how far does fungibility reduce its benefits? These questions are analyzed in a context where a donor wants to target its efforts on a specific sector and specific geographic areas. A traditional...

The notion that foreign aid harms the institutions of recipient governments remains prevalent. We combine new disaggregated aid data and various metrics of political institutions to re-examine this relationship. Long-run cross-section and alternative dynamic panel estimators show a small...

This paper examines historically the World Bank's twin features: lending to developing economies to achieve tangible results and advocating specific development policies. Section 1 provides some conceptual underpinnings for the view that an effective state is essential for development. It asks...

Donors are concerned about how their aid is used, especially how it affects fiscal behaviour by recipient governments. This study reviews the recent evidence on the effects of aid on government spending and tax effort in recipient countries, concluding with a discussion of when (general) budget...

As aid diminishes in importance, donors need a capacity that enables governments to improve the quality of their public spending. In this study I suggest three such organizational innovations: independent ratings of spending systems, Independent Public Service Agencies, and Sovereign Development...

Aid is said to be fungible at the aggregate level if it raises government expenditures by less than the total amount. This happens when the recipient government decreases domestic revenue, decreases net borrowing, or when aid bypasses the budget. This study makes three contributions to both...

This paper responds to the development policy debate involving the World Bank and the IMF on the use of fiscal policy not only for economic stabilization but also to promote economic growth and increase per capita income. A key issue in this debate relates to the effect of the composition of...

This paper uses a novel loan-level dataset covering lending by official creditors to developing country governments to construct an instrument for public spending that can be used to estimate government spending multipliers. Loans from official creditors (primarily multilateral development banks...

This paper studies the relationship between trade tax and domestic tax reforms and poverty in developing countries, and explores whether the role of public goods provision matters in this relationship. Using a sample of 91 developing countries for the 1980-2016 period, I model the trade tax...

A substantial amount of aid to developing countries is given to the government, or goes through the budget, meaning it should have an impact on government fiscal behaviour (particularly on government spending). The few existing empirical studies on the effects of aid on government spending...