Economic adjustment and reform programs, including those supported by international financial institutions (IFIs), must cope with informational asymmetries and special interest politics. This presents a particularly serious issue when IFIs make structural economic reforms a condition for...

The econometric literature has been unable to establish a robust association between foreign aid and growth and poverty reduction. In this paper we argue that aid effectiveness must be assessed using methods that go beyond cross-country regressions. We calibrate a dynamic general equilibrium...

Relatively slow progress toward meeting the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) by their 2015 target date has added urgency to the challenge of reducing global poverty. The authors of this new book--who include scholars from the IMF, World Bank, Oxford University, and the Center for Global...

Intro -- Contents -- I. INTRODUCTION -- II. RELATED LITERATURE -- III. THE MODEL -- IV. CROSS- COUNTRY INCOME DIFFERENCES -- V. POLICY EXPERIMENTS -- VI. THE AID COST OF REFORM -- VII. AID FAILURES -- VIII. CONCLUSION -- REFERENCES -- A. Optimal Fiscal Policy in a Closed Economy -- B. Optimal...

Why do donor countries give foreign aid? The answers found in the literature are: (i) because donor countries care for recipient countries (e.g. altruism), and/or (ii) because there exist distortions that make the indirect gains from foreign aid (e.g. terms of trade effects) to be larger than...