In this paper we investigate the effectiveness of development aid in recipient countries. Specifically, we analyze the relationship between per-capita income and foreign aid for a maximum of 131 recipient countries over the 1960 to 2006 period. We employ annual data and 5-year averages and,...

We investigate the importance of geo-strategic and commercial motives for the allocation of German aid to 138 countries over the 1973-2010 period. We find that geo-strategic and - less robustly - commercial motives matter. When we relate geo-strategic and commercial motives to the political...

We analyze how adding the shadow economy to official output figures affects technical efficiency. We find that this only slightly affects the ranking of efficiency scores, but increases average efficiency. Our results are robust to the functional form of the production technology and the...

This paper analyzes the influence of the shadow economy on corruption and vice versa. We hypothesize that corruption and shadow economy are substitutes in high income countries while they are complements in low income countries. The hypotheses are tested for a crosssection of 120 countries and a...

We analyze the aid portfolio of various bilateral and multilateral donors, testing whether they have prioritised aid in line with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In doing so, we combine sectorally disaggregated aid data with indicators reflecting the situation of recipient countries...

The paper presents a detailed description of IMF and World Bank conditionality and tries to explain changes in this conditionality over time as well as differences between the two institutions. Using panel data it is shown that the number of Fund conditions seem to be influenced by...