The Monterrey Consensus agreed at the UN summit on Financing for Development in 2002 promised a breakthrough in terms of donor generosity, aid effectiveness and new means of financing. However, the development orientation of world leaders proved to be short-lived. This is even though our...

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are widely expected to provide better targeted aid than state agencies with a hidden agenda of commercial and political self-interest. However, principal-agent models question that NGOs decide autonomously on aid allocation. Indeed, we show empirically that...

We assess whether bilateral and multilateral donors of foreign aid specialized and coordinated their activities with other donors as agreed in the Paris Declaration of 2005. We account for donor heterogeneity, varying aid priorities and recipient characteristics in order to isolate changes in...

The aid allocation literature has neglected gender-specific needs for aid. We assess the hypothesis that gender inequality in education is more likely to affect the aid allocation of donor countries with female leadership in the relevant ministry. We find no evidence for a needs-based allocation...

In this paper, we perform a Tobit analysis of aid allocation, covering the period 1999-2002 and accounting for both altruistic and selfish donor motives. It turns out that poorer countries get clearly more aid from both bilateral and multilateral donors. Most donors are also found to direct...