Analyzing US economic and foreign aid data from 1967 to 2007, this paper investigates whether adverse economic and financial conditions are negatively linked to official development assistance (ODA). It finds empirical evidence that US ODA has tended to decline as its economic conditions worsen....

The past thirty years or so has seen microfinance take off from small group-based lending experiments to several thousand financial service providers (FSPs) serving a growing portion of the developing world today. Nevertheless, the challenge to improve broadbased access to financial...