At a time when the international dialogue surrounding development is focused on increasing the quantity of aid, this paper focuses on how the donor community can improve the quality of foreign assistance. The author discusses the problem of project proliferation, and the tendency of developing...

Japan has an impressive history when it comes to aid, industrial policy, and infrastructure development, both as a country that saw meteoric development of its own, and as a country that has been one of the world's largest donors for decades. Looking towards an uncertain future in which...

We examine the impact of geo-referenced World Bank development programs on subnational development using equally sized grid cells with a spatial resolution of 0.5 decimal degrees latitude x longitude as the unit of investigation. The proposed grid cell approach solves a number of endogeneity...

The idea of applying a Cash on Delivery Aid (COD Aid) approach to the health sector has been raised many times, particularly in relation to addressing malaria, HIV/AIDS, maternal health, and water. The idea of COD Aid emerged from an analysis of the basic relationships between those who fund and...

2014 will be an important milestone for shaping the policy field of development cooperation in a post-2015 context. Two central events are taking place. The Global Partnership for Effective Development Cooperation (GPEDC) will convene for its first High-Level Meeting in April 2014 in Mexico...

The proliferation of aid projects may overburden recipient governments with reporting requirements, donor visits, and other administrative overhead, siphoning off scarce domestic recipient resources, such as tax revenue or the time of skilled government officials, from directly productive use....

This paper presents an overview of the economics of international aid, highlighting the historical literature and the contemporary debates. It reviews the “trade-theoretic” and the “contract-theoretic” analytical literature, and the empirical and institutional literature. It demonstrates...

Aid fragmentation and a lack of donor coordination have been widely recognized as principal problems impairing the effectiveness of aid. In particular, the importance of within-country division of labor has been highlighted in recent years. At the same time, rigorous quantitative analyses of...

Using data from 1988 to 2007, we examine to what extent bilateral aid flows of an individual donor to a country depend on aid flows from all other bilateral and multilateral donors to that country. We thereby want to assess to what extent donor coordination, free-riding, selectivity,...

Using data from 1988 to 2007, we examine to what extent bilateral aid flows of an individual donor to a country depend on aid flows from all other bilateral and multilateral donors to that country in that year. We thereby want to assess to what extent donor coordination, free-riding,...