The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness sets targets for increased use by donors of recipient country systems for managing aid. A consensus view holds that country systems are strengthened when donors trust recipients to manage aid funds, but undermined when donors manage aid through...

Olson (1982) and Putnam (1993) provide sharply conflicting perspectives on the impact of private associations on economic well-being and social conflict. Olson (1982) emphasized their propensity to act as special interest groups that lobby for preferential policies, imposing disproportionate...

Why does trust vary so substantially across countries? This paper presents a general equilibrium growth model in which heterogeneous agents transact and face a moral hazard problem. Agents may trust those with whom they transact, but they also have the opportunity to invest resources in...

This paper assesses corruption levels and trends among countries in the transition countries of Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) based on data from several sources that are both widely used and cover most or all countries in the region. Data from firm surveys tend to show improvement in...

Several authors claim to provide evidence that government corruption is less severe in small than in large countries. The authors demonstrate that this relationship is an artifact of sample selection. Most corruption indicators provide ratings only for the countries in which multi-national...

This paper presents evidence that 'social capital' matters for measurable economic performance, using indicators of trust and civic norms from the World Values Survey for a sample of twenty-nine market economies. Membership in formal groups--Putnam's measure of social capital--is not associated...

We show that public investment is dramatically higher in countries with low-quality governance and limited political checks and balances or no competitive elections. This result is robust to a number of specifications. The most plausible interpretation of these results is that these governments...

Aid dependence can potentially undermine the quality of governance and public sector institutions by weakening accountability, encouraging rent-seeking and corruption, fomenting conflict over control of aid funds, siphoning off scarce talent from the bureaucracy, and alleviating pressures to...

Early neoclassical analyses predicted that poor countries would grow faster than wealthy countries because of technological advances and diminishing returns to capital in the latter. The reverse has occurred: poor countries are falling back rather than catching up. The authors suggest here that...