Official flows account for close to half of capital flows to developing countries, and close to 90 per cent of receipts for Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper documents trends in these official flows over the last three decades. The most striking trend has been declining aid volume. Following two...

The Millennium Development Goals have become the frame of reference for most of the development community: the standard by which performance will ultimately be judged. Given their importance, considerable attention has been paid as to whether these goals will be met or not. The overwhelming...

The ultimate measure of aid effectiveness is how aid affects the lives of poor people in developing countries. The huge literature on aid’s macroeconomic impact has remarkably little to say on this topic, and less still in terms of practical advice to government officials and aid...

This is an update of Donath et al. (CRP 21/04) which assessed the effect of the 2001 Universal Primary Education (UPE) in Tanzania on the welfare difference between youth (aged 15-35 according to the official definition) and adult (aged over 35) headed households in 2018. As anybody aged over 25...

Taxation can contribute to state-building through a tax bargain in which taxpayers are willing to increase compliance in return for improved government accountability. There is limited evidence for this in sub-Saharan Africa where it is argued that the fiscal state is weak, with low tax revenues...

Taxation can contribute to state-building through a tax bargain in which taxpayers are willing to increase compliance in return for improved government accountability. There is limited evidence for this in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where it is argued that the fiscal state is weak, with low tax...

Crop diversification is a farm level strategy to augment income, improve food security, and mitigate risks attributable to climate and market shocks. We use three-waves (2011/12 to 2016/17) of nationally representative repeated cross section surveys to study the impact of crop diversification on...

Charitable giving has increasingly become ‘tough love’ - it has come to require recipients to undertake costly prior action. A common justification is that of greater efficiency: willingness to undertake costly actions signals greater productivity from transfers. However, there is a...

There is some debate regarding whether aid to poor recipients should be given in the form of loans or grants. This paper concentrates on whether the form of aid influences the effects on recipient fiscal behaviour. The main part of this paper investigates the recipient tax revenue response to...