In this study, a number of factors have been considered as potential determinants of institutional quality in Sub- Saharan African countries. The empirical analysis has shown that historical factors such as state legitimacy determine the quality of current institutions in the region. Foreign aid...

General budget support (GBS) is funding which is not earmarked for a specific sector or project, but is provided as direct financial support to the public sector in the recipient country. This type of aid is argued to have a positive effect on aid efficiency if it is targeted at countries with...

How is lending to developing countries from bilateral and multilateral creditors affected by sovereign defaults? The existing empirical literature on reputational costs of defaults focuses on lending from private creditors. Many developing countries, however, mostly rely on grants and loans from...

Empirical studies suggest little impact of foreign aid on growth on average. As aid can be viewed as a sovereign rent akin to natural resource rents, it is likely that rent seeking plays a role in explaining this disappointing outcome. The analytic starting point of this paper is the long chain...

The question discussed in this in this paper is whether foreign aid can help accelerate growth in African countries. The paper reviews growth determinants and growth constraints in Africa and discusses how aid can help relieve the constraints. Issues covered are the choice of aid modalities,...

Natural resource rents and foreign aid have the character of windfall gains that affect economic outcomes both directly and indirectly. Several studies have shown that the indirect effect typically works via institutions like corruption. In this article, we offer a theoretical framework for a...

The paper discusses donor coordination and its implications for the uses of aid. The paper starts by specifying a simple framework for the discussion, and then reviews the theoretical literature. It then provides some data on donor proliferation and discusses how coordination modalities have...

A new aid rhetoric emphasises the selective allocation of otherwise unconditional funds in support of recipients drafting their own sensible plans, in contrast to the old practice of lumping money and policies together in donor-wrapped packages. This line of thinking is supported by both the...

While often considered a purely ?nancial institution, the IMF has throughout its history performed non-?nancial services for its member- ship. The latest such example is the Policy Support Instrument (PSI), a certi?cation mechanism established in 2005 for which only poor members are eligible....

This paper concerns optimal income taxation under asymmetric information in a two-type overlapping generations model, where people care about their relative consumption compared to others. The appearance of positional concerns affects the policy choices via two channels: (i) the size of the...