The paper compares different aid policy instruments and their effect on the target group. Starting from a situation where interest groups compete for the resources of the government, international financial institutions aim to change the policy outcome. They can either directly support one group...

Support for private sector development is an important item on the ODA budgets of most donor countries and recently, there has even been an upsurge in the weight given to 'private sector led growth'. The paper raises the basic questions: Why inherently commercial activities should actually be...

This paper uses a static and dynamic gravity model of trade to investigate the link between German development aid and exports from Germany to the recipient countries. The findings indicate that in the long run,German aid is associated with an increase in exports of goods that is larger than the...

Foreign aid is given for a combination of economic, political, and humanitarian motives. While its impact on economic development in recipient countries has been the main focus of research recently, we concentrate on the question to what extent it also promotes donor countries’ exports. We...

We address the pitfalls of averaging by exploiting the longitudinal variation in aid to identify sudden and sharp increases in aid flows. Focusing on specific events, we test if aid accelerations correspond to policies and shocks in the recipient country. For a large sample of 145 recipient...

Careful consideration of the appropriate level and composition of aggregate public spending is vital in low income countries, especially in the presence of large volumes of foreign aid. Not only can expansion of the public sector weaken economic growth, but also provision of public services may...

This paper examines the effect of aid on domestic savings in Sub-Saharan Africa. It departs from the previous literature on aid and savings in developing countries by abandoning the pervasive, but untenable, assumption that all aid is used to expand the trade deficit and thus applied wholly to...