Intro -- Contents -- Foreword -- 1 Introduction: Can't Take It Anymore? -- 2 Making Aid Work -- 3 Use of Randomization in the Evaluation of Development Effectiveness -- 4 It Pays to Be Ignorant: A Simple Political Economy of Rigorous Program Evaluation -- 5 Solutions When the Solution Is the...

The classic narrative of economic development - poor countries are caught in poverty traps, out of which they need a Big Push involving increased aid and investment, leading to a takeoff in per capita income - has been very influential in development economics since the 1950s. This was the...

In the new millennium, the Western aid effort towards Africa has surged due to writings by well-known economists, a celebrity mass advocacy campaign, and decisions by Western leaders to make Africa a major foreign policy priority. This survey contrasts the predominant "transformational" approach...

The Burnside and Dollar (2000, AER) 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...