This article provides a survey of the aid budget literature and examines the determinants of the development aid efforts of 22 Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members over the 1976–2011 period. In fixed effects regressions, we identify aid inertia, per-capita GDP, the creation of an...

The accountability of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has various dimensions. From an economic perspective, official financiers, private donors as well as aid recipients could expect more charitable output from NGOs, if less efficient organizations were squeezed out of international...

We assess empirically whether foreign official development assistance (ODA) has been effective in alleviating HIV/AIDS epidemics, which figures prominently among the Millennium Development Goals. We employ a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach to identify the treatment effect of ODA...

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. We perform negative binominal regressions by making use of a unique dataset...

We account for competition for export markets among donor countries of foreign aid by analyzing spatial dependence in aid allocation. Employing sector-specific aid data, we find that the five largest donors react to aid giving by other donors with whom they compete in terms of exporting goods...

Major DAC donors are widely criticized for weak targeting of aid, selfish aid motives, and insufficient coordination. The emergence of an increasing number of new donors may further complicate the coordination of international aid efforts. At the same time, it is open to question whether new...

Summary Booming foreign direct investment (FDI) in post-reform India is widely believed to promote economic growth. We assess this proposition by subjecting industry-specific FDI and output data to Granger causality tests within a panel cointegration framework. It turns out that the growth...

Summary Empirical evidence on the targeting of private aid is largely lacking, even though corporate donors are an increasingly important source of aid. We contribute to closing this gap by performing a case study of Nestlé. The allocation of Nestlé's aid is compared to that of Swiss ODA and...

Summary We analyze the targeting of non-governmental organization (NGO) aid across countries in a multivariate regression framework, based on a dataset for 61 important international NGOs. While our results show that NGOs are more active in the neediest countries, we reject the hypothesis that...

Summary The previous literature largely ignores the heterogeneity of aid channels used by each single donor country. We estimate Tobit models to assess the relative importance of recipient need, merit, and self-interest of donors for various channels of official and private German aid across a...