Issues related to the volatility of aid flows are now becoming crucial in view of their relevance to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. The paper examines aid volatility using data for 66 aid recipients over the period 1973-2002. We improve upon earlier work in this important...

This paper examines the impact of debt forgiveness and debt relief on official development assistance. From the recipient side, the econometric analysis suggests that countries that received debt relief also received more aid compared to those that did not qualify for debt relief. From the donor...

Aid (ODA, Official Development Assistance) statistics are routinely produced by the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the OECD on the basis of data provided by bilateral donor agencies and using definitions and guidelines that represent a broad donor consensus. The use of new aid...

The donor community has enthusiastically embraced the concept of microfinance as a promising mechanism to attain the objectives of poverty alleviation and microenterprise development. Amid the high expectation, a myth has been inadvertently created that they could be the ultimate solution to...

This paper analyses a number of the challenges confronting developing countries seeking to use the WTO Doha negotiations to promote their economic growth and performance. A precondition for success is to have clear objectives and to take a proactive stance. But a key necessary condition for...

Uganda is the first country to benefit from the 1996 Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC) Initiative, which offers a number of low-income countries an opportunity to negotiate a reduction of their external debt, and is utilizing the savings from the relief to implement social sector reforms,...

The paper presents a comprehensive survey of the ‘shopping list’ of sources of external finance that are directly channelled to the business sector of developing countries. Generally, our analytical survey covers the 1970-2000 period, and includes the distribution of foreign resources...

This study examines Thailand's responses to the December 2004 tsunami and evaluates its reconstruction effort two years after the disaster, supplementing publicly available data with information from a field survey. Though the immediate response to the disaster can be considered a success, and...

After successful emergency relief operations, Sri Lanka initiated post-tsunami reconstruction with optimism and a relatively rapid recovery was expected. However, initial expectations have turned out to be overly optimistic. Coordination problems between agencies, constraints on aid absorption...

This study examines the recovery and reconstruction experience of Indonesia, following the December 2004 Asian tsunami that destroyed much of Aceh island, inflicting some 167,000 fatalities and destroying much of the island's housing and infrastructure. This was followed soon after by a major...