The Monterrey Consensus agreed at the UN summit on Financing for Development in 2002 promised a breakthrough in terms of donor generosity, aid effectiveness and new means of financing. However, the development orientation of world leaders proved to be short-lived. This is even though our...

What determines the foreign aid effort of donor countries? We review the existing literature on donors’ aid budgets and examine which of the suggested variables robustly determine aid effort, measured as Official Development Assistance (ODA) as a share of gross national income. More...

By tracking the changes in different margins of Theil indices during the period 1995-2015, we re-consider the question of whether bilateral and multilateral donors have targeted aid increasingly to particularly needy recipient countries with relatively good governance in order to improve the...

Donor reactions to recent settlements of internal conflicts have been highly diverse, in terms of both overall aid and its sectoral composition. The allocation of post-conflict aid tends to be needs-based by favoring particularly poor countries. There is no conclusive evidence, however, that the...

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...

The paper discusses the pros and cons of capital account liberalization. Rather than contrasting liberalization and regulation of capital flows as irreconcilable antagonisms, we argue that capital account liberalization requires institutional and regulatory safeguards. Even though the...

The claim of globalization critics that the income gap to industrial countries is bound to widen for essentially all developing countries as a consequence of economic globalization is in conflict with empirical evidence. Economic performance differs tremendously across developing countries. We...

Developing countries are constrained in financing current account deficits as real capital mobility is still far from perfect. At the same time, capital flows to these countries proved to be extremely volatile. The paper argues that the long-term problem of "too little" should not be confused...

It is widely believed that foreign aid may help conflict-affected countries to recover after the settlement of conflicts. However, the available empirical evidence supporting this view largely neglects the heterogeneous nature of aid. Drawing on the conflict database of the Uppsala Conflict Data...

Aid proliferation and a lack of coordination are widely recognized as serious problems for aid effectiveness, and donors have repeatedly promised to tackle them, e.g. in the Paris Declaration in 2005 and the Accra Agenda for Action in 2008. In this paper, we employ geocoded aid data from Uganda...