Africa has come a long way since the economic turmoil of the 1980s, the decade of "structural adjustment". Growth has been strong, yet poverty remains high. Underlying the shortage of good livelihoods and high social inequality is the lack of diversification in Africa's economies-in contrast to...

Establishing peace and reconstructing Africa's war-damaged economies are urgent challenges. For Africa to recover, communities must reconstruct, private sectors must revitalize, and states must transform themselves. Thus, unless communities rebuild and strengthen their livelihoods, neither...

To meet development objectives, aid recipients and their donor partners need to effectively manage the macroeconomic effects of aid. Aid can improve the economy's supply-side and raise growth. But if the macroeconomic impact of aid is not managed well it can distort and sometimes undermine...

Summaries To strengthen the help that programme aid gives to poor, we must strengthen its ability to increase the participation of the poor in growth. To do this requires a detailed appraisal during a programme's preparation to identify the expected impact on poverty of both the resource...

This is an introduction to the UNU-WIDER special issue of World Development on aid policy and the macroeconomic management of aid. We provide an overview of the 10 studies, grouping them under three sub-themes: the aid–growth relationship; the supply-side of aid (including its level,...

Commodity price shocks are an important type of external shock and are often cited as a problem for economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa. This paper quantifies the impact of agricultural commodity price shocks using a near vector autoregressive model. The novel aspect of this model is that we...

We examine aid-induced Dutch Disease - after controlling for the effects of remittances and FDI flows - in the context of two North African countries, Morocco and Tunisia. We do so by performing a multivariate time series analysis of aggregated annual data over the period 1980-2009. Aid causes...