A challenge in the development of aggregate indexes of trade protection is finding weights to put on various tariffs that a) reflect their importance to exporters and b) are not endogenous to the protection being measured. One common basis for weights is actual imports; but these, as is...

At a time when the international dialogue surrounding development is focused on increasing the quantity of aid, this paper focuses on how the donor community can improve the quality of foreign assistance. The author discusses the problem of project proliferation, and the tendency of developing...

The proliferation of aid projects may overburden recipient governments with reporting requirements, donor visits, and other administrative overhead, siphoning off scarce domestic recipient resources, such as tax revenue or the time of skilled government officials, from directly productive use....

The Commitment to Development Index of the Center for Global Development ranks the world's 21 richest countries on the "development-friendliness" of their policies. It is revised and updated annually. This working paper includes revisions from the methodology used to develop the 2004 CDI. The...

This working paper by CGD research fellow David Roodman provides an introduction to a particular class of econometric techniques, dynamic panel estimators. The techniques and their implementation in Stata, a statistical software package widely used in the research community, are an important...

The Commitment to Development Index of the Center for Global Development rates 21 rich countries on the "development-friendliness" of their policies. It is revised and updated annually. In the 2004 edition, the component on foreign assistance combines quantitative and qualitative measures of...

The cross-country literature on foreign aid effectiveness has relied on the use of instruments to distinguish causality from mere correlation. This paper uses simple non-instrumental techniques in the spirit of Granger to demonstrate that the main aid-growth connection is a negative causal...

The Burnside and Dollar (2000) finding that aid raises growth in a good policy environment has had an important influence on policy and academic debates. We conduct a data gathering exercise that updates their data from 1970-93 to 1970-97, as well as filling in missing data for the original...

European countries pride themselves on being leaders in spurring development within poor countries. We find that Europe's approach to development could be characterised as energetically tackling the symptoms of poor economic opportunities for developing countries by providing effective aid,...

CGD research fellow David Roodman and Uzma Qureshi analyze microfinance institutions (MFIs) as businesses, asking how some succeed in covering costs, earning returns, attracting capital, and scaling up. We draw on existing literature and interviews with industry players and academics. Key...