The Burnside and Dollar (2000) finding that aid raises growth in a good policy environment has had an important influence on policy and academic debates. We conduct a data gathering exercise that updates their data from 1970-93 to 1970-97, as well as filling in missing data for the original...

Development assistance is the combination of money, advice, and conditions from rich nations and international financial institutions like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund designed to achieve economic development in poor nations. This article argues that development assistance was...

Foreign aid from official sources to developing countries (excluding private aid) amounted to $103.6 billion in 2006 and has amounted to over $2.3 trillion (measured in 2006 dollars) over the past 50 years. There have been fierce debates over how effective this aid has been or could be in the...

Foreign aid critics, supporters, recipients and donors have produced eloquent rhetoric on the need for better aid practices – has this translated into reality? This paper attempts to monitor the best and worst of aid practices among bilateral, multilateral, and UN agencies. We create aid...

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...

The Burnside and Dollar (2000, AER) finding that aid raises growth in a good policy environment has had an important influence on policy and academic debates. We conduct a data gathering exercise that updates their data from 1970 -93 to 1970 -97, as well as filling in missing data for the...

In the new millennium, the Western aid effort towards Africa has surged due to writings by well-known economists, a celebrity mass advocacy campaign, and decisions by Western leaders to make Africa a major foreign policy priority. This survey contrasts the predominant "transformational" approach...

The record of the aid agencies over time seems to indicate weak evidence of progress over time in response to learning from experience, new knowledge, or changes in political climate. The few positive results are an increased sensitivity to per capita income of the recipient (although it...