Until recently, trade in services was mostly ignored by iinternational economists, reflecting a perception that services were nontradable. This has never been true. Transportation and travel, for example, have always been important economic activities. In 1995, services trade climbed to a...

This paper analyzes the impact of donor fragmentation on the quality of government bureaucracy in aid-recipient nations. A formal model of a donor's decision to hire government administrators to manage donor-funded projects predicts that the number of administrators hired declines as the donor's...

Lending institutions'initial appraisals often ignore the true costs of environmental impacts, and many development projects are launched despite returns that are often below the cost of capital and all too often actually negative. Most environmental impacts are negative, so approving a project...

The author recommends using more quantitative economic analysis in appraising technical assistance loans and loan components. After giving a brief history of tecnhical assistance and the problems commonly associated with it, he describes classifications of technical assistance, proposes a new...

Much of the academic debate on the effectiveness of foreign aid is centered on the relationship between aid and growth. Different aid-growth studies find conflicting results: aid promotes growth everywhere; aid has a zero or negative impact on growth everywhere; or the effect of aid on growth...

The authors derive a poverty-efficient allocation of aid and compare it with actual aid allocations. They build the poverty-efficient allocation in two stages. First they use new World Bank ratings of 20 different aspects of national policy to establish the current relationship between aid,...

The authors examine the allocation of foreign aid by 41 donor agencies, bilateral and multilateral. Their policy selectivity index measures the extent to which a donor's assistance is targeted to countries with sound institutions and policies, controlling for per capita income and population....

The paper is intended to provide an orientation to the past and present work of the Social Development network and a contribution to its future strategy. It presents a brief overview of the history of the Social Development network or family; it illustrates both continuity and change in the way...

If development is seen basically as autonomous self-development, then there is a subtle paradox in the whole notion of development assistance: How can an outside party ("helper") assist those undertaking autonomous activities (the"doers") without overriding, or undercutting their autonomy? This...

The authors of this paper use a new database on foreign aid to examine the relationships among foreign aid, economic policies, and growth of per capita GDP. In panel growth regressions for 56 developing countries and 6 four-year periods (1970-93), they find that the policies that have a great...