Performance-based aid has been proposed as an alternative to the failed traditional approach whereby donors make aid conditional on the reform promises of recipient countries. However, hardly any empirical evidence exists on whether ex post rewards are effective in inducing reforms. We attempt...

Using a new dataset for 41 German non-governmental organizations (NGOs), we analyze the allocation of NGO aid across recipient countries in a Tobit regression framework. By identifying for each NGO the degree of public refinancing, we address the largely unresolved issue of whether financial...

The decisions of foreign investors on technical cooperation versus equity engagements and on the degree of ownership in FDI projects are likely to depend on their relative bargaining position vis-à-vis the host country. India provides an interesting case for analyzing the interplay between...

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...

We investigate the importance of geo-strategic and commercial motives for the allocation of German aid to 138 countries over the 1973-2010 period. We find that geo-strategic and – less robustly – commercial motives matter. When we relate geo-strategic and commercial motives to the political...

Political proximity between donor and recipient governments may impair the effectiveness of aid by encouraging favoritism. By contrast, political misalignment between donor and recipient governments may render aid less effective by adding to transaction costs and giving rise to incentive...

This paper empirically analyzes the impact of aid on education for about 100 countries over the period 1970-2005. We estimate a system of equations to test whether and to what extent the impact of sector-specific aid on educational attainment depends on (i) the extent to which aid adds to...

NGO aid is still widely believed to be superior to official aid (ODA). However, the incentives of NGOs to excel and target aid to the poor and deserving are increasingly disputed. We contribute to the emerging literature on the allocation of NGO aid by performing panel Tobit estimations for...

This paper analyzes whether and to what extent non-governmental organizations (NGOs) outperform official donors by allocating aid in a way that renders effective poverty alleviation more likely. We employ Probit and Tobit models and make use of an exceptionally detailed database that allows an...

We analyze the aid portfolio of various bilateral and multilateral donors, testing whether they have prioritised aid in line with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). In doing so, we combine sectorally disaggregated aid data with indicators reflecting the situation of recipient countries...