What determines the foreign aid effort of donor countries? We review the existing literature on donors' aid budgets and examine which of the suggested variables robustly determine aid effort, measured as Official Development Assistance (ODA) as a share of gross national income. More...

Using survey data on Bulgarian and Macedonian firms that participated in USAID programs providing technical and financial assistance for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and on firms that did not, we estimate the effectiveness of such assistance in increasing the growth of employment in...

What determines the foreign aid effort of donor countries? We review the existing literature on donors' aid budgets and examine which of the suggested variables robustly determine aid effort, measured as Official Development Assistance (ODA) as a share of gross national income. More...

The central argument of this paper is how food-aid to Third-World countries and the subsequent policy changes that have to be made to facilitate such foreign imports, destroy the local production capability of the recipient nation- creating a permanent handicap on food security of that country....

India's rural households continued to remain financially excluded prominently compared to urban households particularly with respect to their access to institutional credit. Nearly half (44%) of the credit requirements of rural households is still met through non-institutional sources of finance...

We use loan-level data on syndicated lending to a large sample of developing countries between 1993and 2017 to estimate the mobilization effects of multilateral development banks (MDBs), controllingfor a large set of fixed effects. We find evidence of positive and significant direct and...

Public–private partnerships (PPPs) face a range of challenges in developed economies, such as appropriate risk sharing, attracting the right sponsors, and ensuring quality of service. As a large percentage of ADB's developing member countries are considered risky borrowers by international...

Prioritizing the growth of particular sectors or regions is often part of a low income country's growth strategy. We study a prototypical example of such policies in Ethiopia, exploiting geographic and sectoral variation in the form and scale of the policy for identification. Using product-level...

In the post-COVID-19 environment, policy makers in many countries will be searching for revenues. Due to the political difficulty of creating new taxes or raising existing ones significantly, the focus may well shift to improving the yield of existing or reformed taxes. We explore VAT revenue...