The ability to export clothing products under preferences with liberal rules of origin is the key factor currently determining whether the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) has a significant impact on non-oil exporting African countries. At present only a small number of countries...

Trade can be a key driver of growth for African countries, as it has been for those countries, particularly in East Asia, that have experienced high and sustained rates of growth. Economic partnership agreements with the European Union could be instrumental in a competitiveness framework, but to...

The paper investigates the effects of short-term political motivations on the effectiveness of foreign aid. Specifically, the paper tests whether the effect of aid on economic growth is reduced by the share of years a country served on the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) in the period the...

This paper examines whether domestic output growth helps attract capital inflows and, in turn, capital inflows help boost output growth in a set of 38 Sub-Saharan African countries. Using a two-step approach to address reverse causality and omitted variable issues, the paper finds that output...

The authors develop a macroeconomic framework that captures links between aid, public investment, growth, and poverty. Public investment is disaggregated into education, infrastructure, and health, and affects both aggregate supply and demand. Dutch disease effects are captured by accounting for...

The authors examine the empirical evidence in support of the poverty trap view of underdevelopment. They calibrate simple aggregate growth models in which poverty traps can arise due to either low saving or low technology at low levels of development. They then use these models to assess the...

The authors revisit the relationship between aid and growth using a new data set focusing on the 1990s. The evidence supports the view that the impact of aid depends on the quality of state institutions and policies. The authors use an overall measure of institutions and policies popular in the...

An abundance of natural resources is both an opportunity and a challenge for developing countries. Several resource-rich, low-income countries receive amounts of foreign aid that are similar to or larger than their actual or potential revenues from natural resources. In such countries, the...

The literature on aid and growth has not found a convincing instrumental variable to identify the causal effects of aid. This paper exploits an instrumental variable based on the fact that since 1987, eligibility for aid from the International Development Association (IDA) has been based partly...