Trade promotes economic growth, alleviates poverty and helps countries reach their development goals. However, developing countries – in particular the least developed – face difficulties in making trade happen and turning trade into economic growth. The Aid for Trade Initiative – launched...

This paper discusses AfT's role in reducing poverty. Using cross-country data for 52 countries during 2000-2011, it assesses whether AfT has had a measurable direct effect on poverty in Africa. The paper finds compelling evidence that AfT has directly impacted on poverty, particularly in LDCs...

In this study, we derive a poverty-minimizing allocation rule, based on which we assess the povertyefficiency of actual aid allocations, with a special focus on the comparative impact of new donors and new non-aid flows. The results suggest a substantial misallocation of aid. Our benchmark...

There is an urgent need to mainstream the key challenges of climate change into sector and development planning and decision making processes to create sustainable long-term development. Empirical results in this study emphasize that more caution is needed in directing overseas development aid...

We develop a theoretical model of foreign aid to analyse a method of disbursement of aid which induces the recipient government to follow a more pro-poor policy than it otherwise would do. In our two-period model, aid is given in the second period and the volume of it depends on the level of...

The rival opinions expressed by Jeffrey Sachs in his book The End of Poverty and by William Easterly in The White Man's Burden epitomize the dichotomy in the economics literature regarding the role of foreign aid in eliminating extreme poverty. On the one hand, the majority of governments see...

As the world approaches the halfway point to the target year of 2030 for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) approved in 2015, it is clear that poverty will be far from eradicated by then. Absolute poverty is concentrated in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) and overwhelmingly in 12-15...

Social investment funds are prominent instruments in developing countries that aim at providing financial resources for social infrastructure projects to poor municipalities. In contrast to traditional, more centralised distribution mechanisms of such funds, the Bolivian Fondo de Inversión...

Bilateral or multilateral organizations control about 90% of official overseas development assistance (ODA), much of which is wasted. This note traces aid failure to the daisy chain of principal-agent-beneficiary relationships linking rich donors to aid bureaucrats to poor recipients. Waste...

Focusing on seven bilateral donors over a 25 year period, the paper answers 4 questions related to aid allocation practice. Questions one and two examine allocation differences between donors and time periods. Questions three and four relate to changes in poverty and policy selectivity. To...