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...

The paper considers the experience of the European Investment Bank and addresses policy lessons for developing countries as they seek finance for development. The paper argues that the key lesson for developing countries is that the traditional role of a development bank in closing market gaps...

Can a society suffering contests between rich and poor achieve good governance in the face of endemic corruption? We examine a stylized poor state with weak institutions in which a "culture of evasion" damages state authority. Many evade tax payments, limiting the state's economic development...

Almost all major development institutions today say that promoting good governance is an important part of their agendas. Despite this consensus, 'good governance' is an extremely elusive objective: it means different things to different organizations and to different actors within these...

Governments can play great roles in their countries, regions, and cities; facilitating or leading the resolution of festering problems and opening new pathways for progress. Examples are more numerous than one might imagine and raise an important question: 'how do governments become great?'....

Institution-building in Somalia has met with high levels of failure for two decades. But successes have occurred in other Somali-inhabited regions of the eastern Horn, and have been especially present at the local and municipal level. The most effective aid to institution-building in Somalia has...

This study draws on a rigorous systematic review-to our knowledge the first in this area-to take stock of the literature on aid and democracy. It asks: Does aid-especially democracy aid-have positive impact on democracy? How? What factors most influence its impact? In so doing, it considers...

This paper proposes a reformed architecture of the international monetary system based on three pillars. The first is a representative apex organization, which can be understood as a transformation of the G-20 into a representative international institution. The second is the continuous reform...

This paper analyses the history and effectiveness of the two major mechanisms of resolution of balance of payments crisis. It argues that IMF lending has met its counter-cyclical objectives through history and has been improving in terms of providing adequate lending facilities as well as...

This paper discusses the recent history of education aid policy. It highlights an important shift in policy thinking in the international aid architecture that has dominated the global education aid agenda since the early 1990s. It argues that Rawlsian principles of social justice, human rights...