Hopes for development aid remain high among Western politicians and pundits, but the evidence is depressing. Foreign aid has on average probably no effect on long-run growth. To understand the failure of many development projects, we need a deeper consideration of the failure of top-down...

The Burnside and Dollar (2000) finding that aid raises growth in a good policy environment has had an important influence on policy and academic debates. We conduct a data gathering exercise that updates their data from 1970-93 to 1970-97, as well as filling in missing data for the original...

The Burnside and Dollar (2000) finding that aid raises growth in a good policy environment has had an important influence on policy and academic debates. We conduct a data gathering exercise that updates their data from 1970-93 to 1970-97, as well as filling in missing data for the original...

Theoretical models predict that countries with unchanged long-run savings preferences will respond to debt relief by running up new debts or by running down assets. And there are some signs that incremental debt relief over the past two decades has fulfilled those predictions. Debt relief is...

The international effort to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 has given fresh prominence to the idea of poverty traps, a notion that was widely current in the 1950s. This idea, most actively promoted by economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and...

Ethnic diversity has a more adverse effect on economic policy and growth when a government's institutions are poor. But poor institutions have an even more adverse effect on growth and policy when ethnic diversity is high

High-quality institutions-reflected in such factors as rule of law, bureaucratic quality, freedom from government expropriation, and freedom from government repudiation of contracts-mitigate the adverse economic effects of ethnic fractionalization identified by Easterly and Levine (1997) and...

November 2000 Ethnic diversity has a more adverse effect on economic policy and growth when a government's institutions are poor. But poor institutions have an even more adverse effect on growth and policy when ethnic diversity is high. High-quality institutions - reflected in such factors as...