In 2010, the G8 placed renewed focus on maternal health via the Muskoka Initiative by committing to spend an additional US$5 billion on maternal, newborn, and child health before 2015. Following the end of the Millennium Development Goals and the advent of the Sustainable Development Goals,...

The reduction in deaths from diarrheal diseases is one of the significant public health successes of the twentieth century. That said, the disease still accounts for a significant burden of childhood morbidity and mortality in low- and middle-income countries. Progress made in the past has, to a...

I examine impacts of general budget support in 12 countries using the synthetic control approach. First, I analyse changes in government expenditures on health before and after the introduction of budget support. Second, I look at neonatal mortality (a presumed proxy for improvements in health...

This paper primarily focuses on how global funding has supported interventions that have proven to be successful in reducing maternal, newborn, and child mortality around the world. The growth rate of development assistance targeted towards these specific interventions has varied greatly over...

In this paper, we present new projections for a range of global poverty-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically, extreme monetary poverty, undernutrition, stunting, child mortality, maternal mortality, and access to clean water and basic sanitation. Our projections, based on...

Japan has an impressive history when it comes to aid, industrial policy, and infrastructure development, both as a country that saw meteoric development of its own, and as a country that has been one of the world's largest donors for decades. Looking towards an uncertain future in which...

Financing and the role of aid within the water sector are poorly understood. We estimate the levels of spending achieved in developing countries during the Millennium Development Goals period to be US$80 billion per year. Aid represented a substantial proportion of total sector financing in...

The principle of inclusive development lies at the heart of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and in particular Goal 16, with its focus on inclusive societies backed by inclusive institutions. Yet despite its ubiquity across the SDGs, inclusivity not only remains ill-defined, but is both...

In this paper, we explore the relationship between foreign aid fungibility and aggregate welfare. Using panel data from 35 low-income and lower-middle-income countries, we first check the presence of sectoral aid fungibility in our sample and find evidence for it. We then use econometric methods...

Empirical studies on the effectiveness of aid to the water, sanitation, and hygiene sector (WASH aid) have focused primarily on access to these services as the benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of aid in this sector. Given the importance of WASH services for public health outcomes, the...