The international effort to meet the Millennium Development Goals by 2015 has given fresh prominence to the idea of poverty traps, a notion that was widely current in the 1950s. This idea, most actively promoted by economist Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University's Earth Institute and...

This paper integrates two main strands of the aid-development nexus in assessing whether institutional thresholds matter in the effectiveness of foreign aid on institutional development in 53 African countries over the period 1996-2010. Eight government quality indicators are employed: rule of...

Purpose - This paper examines whether initial levels in GDP growth, GDP per capita growth and inequality adjusted human development matter in the impact of aid on development. In substance its object is to assess if threshold development conditions are necessary for the effectiveness of foreign...

We examine the impact of geo-referenced World Bank development programs on subnational development using equally sized grid cells with a spatial resolution of 0.5 decimal degrees latitude x longitude as the unit of investigation. The proposed grid cell approach solves a number of endogeneity...

To continue its economic growth and create new and better livelihoods, Africa must transform the productive side of its economy. Ongoing globalization - in trade, finance, and technology - opens up new possibilities for structural transformation, but also new risks as Africa's integration with...

This paper presents a two-sector small semi-open economy Ramsey growth model involving foreign aid as an input in the production function. An activist government allocates this input endogenously across sectors and optimizes policies in a non-standard way. Once calibrated, mainly on countries...

This paper presents a two-sector small semi-open economy Ramsey growth model involving foreign aid as an input in the production function. An activist government allocates this input endogenously across sectors and optimizes policies in a non-standard way. Once calibrated, mainly on countries...

Does aid contribute to human development other than by increasing growth? In doing so, is aid more or less effective in poorer countries (those with low levels of aggregate welfare)? This paper addresses these issues, assessing if there is cross-country aggregate evidence for an effect of aid on...

The rival opinions expressed by Jeffrey Sachs in his book The End of Poverty and by William Easterly in The White Man's Burden epitomize the dichotomy in the economics literature regarding the role of foreign aid in eliminating extreme poverty. On the one hand, the majority of governments see...