Empirical studies normally analyze diverse and heterogeneous groups of countries, producing very mixed evidence on the effectiveness of development aid in promoting growth. We focus on whether aid promotes economic growth in transitional economies. We find that aid, on average, has had a...

This paper seeks to quantify the effects of improved donor coordination on aid effectiveness. Empirical estimates are first provided of the reductions in transaction costs that can be achieved by better donor coordination via concentration to fewer partner countries and a shift from project aid...

In Nowak-Lehmann et al. (2012), we used time-series methods to investigate the impact of aid on per capita GDP. Lof, Mekasha, and Tarp (LMT, 2014) criticize our econometric approach, our interpretation, and our data-handling procedure which lead to a large share of missing observations in some...

This paper confirms recent evidence of a positive impact of aid on growth and widens the scope of evaluation to a range of outcomes including proximate sources of growth (e.g., physical and human capital), indicators of social welfare (e.g., poverty and infant mortality), and measures of...

In the long run tax effort, we argue, determines the effectiveness of aid, and this relationship operates simultaneously with the negative link in the opposite direction observed by Bräutigam and Knack (2004) and others. Tax effort and the ability of the state to diversify its taxation...

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...

In this introductory essay to the special issue, we introduce a new dataset of foreign assistance, AidData, that covers more bilateral and multilateral donors and more types of aid than existing datasets while also improving project-level information about the purposes and activities funded by...

This paper offers new measures of aid quality covering 38 bilateral and multilateral donors, as well as new insights about the robustness and usefulness of such measures. The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the follow-up 2008 Accra Agenda for Action have focused attention on...

As many cases studies show, successful public health measures are being implemented in many places around the globe, and country-level mortality has fallen significantly in recent decades in all but a few countries. Are the two linked? Does development assistance for health (DAH) improve, on...

We examine the idea that aid and foreign direct investment (FDI) are complementary sources of foreign capital. We argue that the relationship between aid and FDI is theoretically ambiguous: aid raises the marginal productivity of capital when used to finance complementary inputs (like public...