The implicit assumption of the donor community is that Africa is trapped by its poverty, and that aid is necessary if Africa is to escape the trap. In this working paper, CGD president Nancy Birdsall suggests an alternative assumption: that Africa is caught in an institutional trap, wherein a...

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...

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...

Foreign aid has been distributing for many decades with the ‘theoretical' expectation that it will work as a catalyst for development by boosting domestic savings, investment and economic activities. But in ‘practice,' foreign aid has been debated for its performance. Particularly in the...

Hopes for development aid remain high among Western politicians and pundits, but the evidence is depressing. Foreign aid has on average probably no effect on long-run growth. To understand the failure of many development projects, we need a deeper consideration of the failure of top-down...

Hezbollah, a Shia Islamist political party and militant group based in Lebanon, is believed to receive a significant amount of informal funding from Iran. In this paper we evaluate whether this funding has had any economically meaningful effect on subnational development in Lebanon. Since the...

This paper examines the role of private actors in international development aid, focusing on four new actors or actors who have in recent years taken on new roles: (1) transnational aid NGOs as a channel of delivery for public (governmental) development aid; (2) transnational aid NGOs as...