Aid Effectiveness: A comparison of Tied and Untied Aid

We evaluate the differential effects of Tied and Untied aid on growth, and how these effects vary with the policy environment of the recipient country. To do so, we use Burnside and Dollar (2000) and Easterly, Levine and Roodman (2003) datasets. We find that aid effectiveness is not significantly different for the two types of aid. However, when we condition on policies, we find that untied aid has a greater impact on growth than tied aid. We find that this difference is significant for the sample of low and middle-income countries, and is not statistically significant, but consistent in sign for the sub sample of low-income countries.