Our objective is to test the hypothesis that aid can improve the welfare of the poor. Part of this effect is direct, if aid is targeted on the poor, and part is indirected, via the transmission channel of aid-financed public spending on social services - sanitation, education and health. This...

The paper examines the questions of which fiscal (public expenditure and taxation) options work in terms of poverty reduction, and how they can be made implementable in practice. The point of departure is that although the poor, acting on their own, are politically weak, nonetheless there are...

In accounting for the rather gloomy trend of the aid effectiveness literature over the last few years, one explanatory strand has been fiscal, suggesting in particular that aid flows in weak states have tended to erode the taxbase and the structure of institutions. We pursue this idea, tracing...

This paper proposes a novel method of isolating fluctuations in public spending that are likely to be uncorrelated with contemporaneous macroeconomic shocks and can be used to estimate government spending multipliers. The approach relies on two features unique to many low-income countries: (1)...

This paper uses a novel loan-level dataset covering lending by official creditors to developing country governments to construct an instrument for public spending that can be used to estimate government spending multipliers. Loans from official creditors (primarily multilateral development banks...

This paper uses a novel loan-level dataset covering lending by official creditors to developing country governments to construct an instrument for government spending. These loans typically finance multi-year spending projects, with disbursements linked to the stages of project implementation....