This survey essay reviews over 200 papers in arguing that in order to achieve sustainable and inclusive development, foreign aid should not orient developing countries towards industrialisation in the perspective of Kuznets but in the view of Piketty. Abandoning the former's view that inequality...

We present an analysis of the effects of foreign aid on economic development when the quality of governance may be compromised by corruption. The analysis is based on a dynamic general equilibrium model in which growth is driven by capital accumulation and public policy is administered by...

In many countries extreme poverty is unnecessary. Yet it persists. We propose a simple index, denoted the Miser index, to measure the extent to which societies have poverty in the midst of affluence. It builds on the generalized Lorenz curve, but can also be seen as a measure of polarization...

This paper reviews the main obstacles to human and social development posed by the current external debt burdens of the least development countries. In particular, it analyses the shortcomings of the mechanisms and thresholds used to assess the sustainability of debt levels in the HIPC...

While growth has increased in Tanzania during the past five or six years, it is still too low to have a visible impact on poverty. Indeed, recent evidence suggests that the amounts of both income and non-income poverty are roughly the same as they were a decade ago. Since debt relief provided...

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) have lofty expectations regarding the impact of official development aid. Are these expectations valid? This paper surveys the literature on aid and growth. It finds that practically all aid studies since the late 1990s conclude that aid increases economic...

Wie könnten Demokratisierungsprozesse weltweit wirksamer gefördert werden alsbisher? Einige Autoren schlagen zu diesem Zweck bilaterale Verträge über einenTausch von Entwicklungshilfe als Gegenleistung für institutionelle Reformen inRichtung Demokratie vor. Aus der Perspektive der...

Most rich countries developed without aid, and this 'self-development' has some intrinsic advantages. In today's massively unequal world, however, such an approach would imply very low levels of human development for several generations for many poor countries. Aid can therefore usefully be...

The impact of occult belief on legitimacy of the state and on aid for democratization in Africa: Among politicians and development experts in Africa alike there is a growing awareness of the never decreasing importance of the belief in magic and witchcraft on political decision making since...

The debate by Okada & Samreth (2012, EL) and Asongu (2012, EB; 2013, EEL) on 'the effect of foreign aid on corruption' in its current state has the shortcoming of modeling corruption as a direct effect of development assistance. This note extends the debate by assessing the channels of foreign aid...