Acknowledging that aid proliferation and a lack of coordination impair aid effectiveness, donors have repeatedly promised to specialize and better coordinate their aid activities, most notably in the Paris Declaration of 2005. We exploit geocoded aid data from Malawi to assess whether the...

Large-scale agricultural land acquisitions might entail substantial welfare implications for the affected rural population. Whether the impacts are indeed as devastating as the popular notion of "land grabs" would suggest depends on a number of factors, including the size of compensation...

In this paper, a real-financial CGE model is employed for Bolivia to simulate the macroeconomic and distributional effects of exchange rate policy in a highly dollarized economy. Overall, dollarization appears to matter more through real than through financial-sector effects. The main...

A core result of the aid allocation literature is that the quality of governance in recipient countries does not affect the amounts of foreign aid received. Donor countries may still give aid to poorly-governed countries because of a dilemma they face: those countries most in need typically also...

In this paper, we perform a Tobit analysis of aid allocation, covering the period 1999- 2002 and accounting for both altruistic and selfish donor motives. It turns out that poorer countries get clearly more aid from both bilateral and multilateral donors. Most donors are also found to direct...

We present a two-step approach of assessing whether major donors of foreign aid have met recent demands for less proliferated and better coordinated aid efforts. First, we calculate Theil indices revealing the concentration of each donor’s aid on recipient countries and specific aid sectors....

This paper evaluates the effect of AIDS-related mortality on per-capita incomes of surviving household members, using a large nationally representative sample of rural households from Zambia. To minimize selection bias that may arise because AIDS is likely to be the endogenous outcome of...

This paper deals with the question of whether the discrimination against agriculture that prevailed in Sub-Saharan Africa until the early 1980s has continued to characterize the region despite the widespread adoption of structural adjustment programs. The evolution of both direct interventions...

Using panel data for 143 countries over the period 1973-2002, this paper empirically analyzes the influence of US aid on voting patterns in the UN General Assembly. We use disaggregated aid data to account for the fact that various forms of aid may differ in their ability to induce political...

This paper provides an account of the evolution of poverty and inequality during adjustment in Bolivia, covering the period 1985–99. It turns out that urban poverty declined somewhat after the initial stabilization phase that followed the hyperinflation in 1985. A similar evolution of per...