This paper discusses past and current social policy strategies in the international aid architecture. From the 1990s, aid strategy and policy shifted to put a stronger emphasis on human development. This accelerated with the Millennium Development Goals and will continue under the Sustainable...

We investigate the effects of short-term political motivations on the effectiveness of foreign aid. Donor countries ́political motives might reduce the effectiveness of conditionality, channel aid to inferior projects or affect the way aid is spent in other ways, reduce the aid bureaucracyś...

Bailouts sponsored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are famous for their conditionality: in return for continued installments of desperately needed loans, governments must comply with austere policy changes. Many have suggested, however, that politically important countries face rather...

This paper analyses the way aid for agriculture and rural development in the global south has changed over time. It finds three key shifts. First, a change in funding priority that has seen aid commitments move to the social sectors. Second is a shift in priority within agriculture and rural...

Discontent with the substantial influence of major global players in International Financial Institutions (IFIs) has raised a call to restructure these organizations. Greater involvement of borrowing members in lending decisions has been proposed in order to limit the exposure of development...

Bailouts sponsored by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are famous for their conditionality: in return for continued installments of desperately needed loans, governments must comply with austere policy changes. Many have suggested, however, that politically important countries face rather...

Ongoing empirical research on the drivers of project-aid effectiveness relies on World Bank evaluation ratings across heterogeneous aid sectors. This leads to two problems. First, it is difficult to identify which dimension of project performance World Bank evaluation ratings are measuring...

A new methodology, Tracking Under-Reported Financial Flows (TUFF), allows us to systematically gather open-source information - e.g. news reports, case studies, project inventories from embassy websites, and grant and loan data published by recipient governments - about Chinese development...

This paper uses simple regression techniques to make an initial assessment of the monetary damages caused by the January 12, 2010 earthquake that struck Haiti. Damages are estimated for a disaster with both 200,000 and 250,000 total dead and missing (i.e., the range of mortality that the...

Multilateral development finance is at a critical juncture. In the past 70 years, it has developed through four distinct stages. The Bretton Woods conference established the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in 1944 to finance post-war reconstruction and stabilize the global...