While growth has increased in Tanzania during the past five or six years, it is still too low to have a visible impact on poverty. Indeed, recent evidence suggests that the amount of both income and non-income poverty are roughly the same as they were a decade ago. Since debt relief provided...

Bilateral donors use foreign aid to pursue soft power. We test the effectiveness of aid in reaching this goal by leveraging a new dataset on the precise commitment, implementation, and completion dates of Chinese development projects. We use data from the Gallup World Poll for 126 countries over...

Recent empirical evidence suggests that Chinese development finance may be particularly prone to elite capture and patronage spending. If aid ends up in the pockets of political elites and their ethno-regional networks, this may exacerbate ethnic grievances and contribute to ethnic mobilization....

Drawing on our recent work on local effects of Chinese development projects in Africa, this review article highlights a number of distinguishing features of Chinese aid, and discusses how these may translate into local aid impacts that differ from those of other donors. Unlike aid from other...

This paper evaluates the effect of development project aid from the World Bank and China on firms' sales growth, using a large dataset of 110864 firms spanning 121 countries between 2001 and 2016. We find that, contrary to the World Bank, Chinese ODA projects increase, on average, firm sales...

Developing country performance with respect to economic policies and institutional behaviour is a common criterion for the allocation of aid among recipient countries. This paper questions the manner in which performance is used in this regard, arguing that performance is too narrowly defined. A...

This paper analyzes aid allocation from a normative point of view. It attempts to design aid allocation criteria adapted to development goals and combining the principles of effectiveness and equity in a transparent and integrated framework. The common view about aid selectivity, which...

The last fifteen years have seen an intensive discussion on the effectiveness of aid. Part of the debate focused on the (often confusing and conflicting) evidence from growth regressions regarding the effect of aid on economic growth in recipient countries. A different discussion (probably of...

The Aid for Trade (AFT) Initiative was announced at the 2005 Hong-Kong World Trade Organisation (WTO) ministerial. Then, Doha round talks were stalled as developing countries were disenchanted with the world trading system they had signed up to a decade earlier under the Single Undertaking,...

The African Development Bank allocates its concessional resources through a procedure which is mainly based on the quality of the beneficiary countries' economic policy and governance. This allocation procedure relies mainly on the Performance-Based Allocation formula which can be criticized on...