The COVID-19 pandemic represents an unprecedented global crisis. The task for economic policy is to help keep people alive, enterprises afloat, and households out of poverty. The pandemic has macroeconomic dimensions. First, it affects macroeconomic stability and growth. Second, the tools of...

Foreign aid is one of the few topics in the development discourse with such an uninterrupted, yet volatile history in terms of interest and attention from academics, policymakers, and practitioners alike. Does aid work in promoting growth and reducing poverty in the developing world? Will a new...

Foreign aid has undergone many fundamental shifts since the middle of the last century. During the 1960s and 1970s, the international development community added a multilateral agenda of development goals, institutions, and procedures to traditional bilateralism. Thinking about development...

This is the first in a series of articles that Angle will be running before and after the 4th High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, organized by the Republic of Korea and the OECD (29 November to 1 December 2011). These articles include some of the results now emerging from UNU-WIDER's...

This is an introduction to the UNU-WIDER special issue of World Development on aid policy and the macroeconomic management of aid. We provide an overview of the 10 studies, grouping them under three sub-themes: the aid–growth relationship; the supply-side of aid (including its level,...

The notion that foreign aid harms the institutions of recipient governments remains prevalent. We combine new disaggregated aid data and various metrics of political institutions to re-examine this relationship. Long-run cross-section and alternative dynamic panel estimators show a small...