The authors assess the effect of economic instability on the success of projects funded by the World Bank using the outcome of the projects, which is a notation of their overall success determined by the Bank's Independent Evaluation Group. It has been argued in macroeconomic studies that aid...

In response to the need expressed by the UN General Assembly, an economic vulnerability index (EVI) has been defined by the Committee for Development Policy. The present paper, which refers to this index, first examines how a structural economic vulnerability index can be designed for the...

In the run-up to the Paris Summit, the question of mobilizing new resources to finance development and global public goods seems to receive much more attention than the way in which these new funds, like the old ones, are allocated among countries. If there is to be a "financial pact", it should...

Allocation is here understood as allocation among countries, while it is sometime taken as allocation between projects or operations. Intercountry allocation is an essential issue for concessional resources that are scarce. This note presents few remarks on the allocation of concessional...

In previous papers we have argued that aid is likely to mitigate the negative effects of external shocks on economic growth (i.e., aid is more effective in countries that are more vulnerable to external shocks). Recently an important debate has emerged about the possible negative effects of aid...

We argue in this paper that cancelling the debt of the poorest countries was a good thing, but that it should not imply that the debt instrument should be foregone. Debt and debt cancellations are indeed two complementary instruments which, if properly managed, perform better than either loans...