Trade can be a powerful engine for economic growth, poverty reduction, and development. However, harnessing the power of trade is often difficult for developing countries, particularly the least developed countries, because of supply-side domestic constraints (lack of trade-related...

The current framework for improving aid effectiveness, the ‘Paris’ agenda of harmonization and alignment, has been found lacking. Alternatives are needed. This paper highlights some examples of recent innovations in the management and delivery of development aid. Drawing upon Barder (2009)...

We investigate the heterogeneity of the impact of World Bank foreign aid projects on local economic development across countries, sectors and time. Using a grid-cell dataset of geo-referenced aid data, satellite night-time light imagery, and climatic and socio-economic controls, we employ a...

Chinese aid comes with few strings attached, allowing recipient country leaders to use it for domestic political purposes. The vulnerability of Chinese aid to political capture has prompted speculation that it may be economically ineffective, or even harmful. We test these claims by estimating...

Chinese aid comes with few strings attached, allowing recipient country leaders to use it for domestic political purposes. The vulnerability of Chinese aid to political capture has prompted speculation that it may be economically ineffective, or even harmful. We test these claims by estimating...

The empirical literature explaining the driving forces behind the flows of development aid consists of (at least) 166 studies. One factor that has been analyzed in 30 of these studies is growth in the recipient country. A priori the effect may as well be positive as negative. This is an...

This paper evaluates the effect of development project aid from the World Bank and China on firms' sales growth, using a large dataset of 110864 firms spanning 121 countries between 2001 and 2016. We find that, contrary to the World Bank, Chinese ODA projects increase, on average, firm sales...

We use an excludable instrument to test the effect of bilateral foreign aid on economic growth in a sample of 96 recipient countries over the 1974-2009 period. We interact donor government fractionalization with a recipient country's probability of receiving aid. The results show that...