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 examines the role of private actors in international development aid, focusing on four new actors or actors who have in recent years taken on new roles: (1) transnational aid NGOs as a channel of delivery for public (governmental) development aid; (2) transnational aid NGOs as...

Foreign aid has been distributing for many decades with the ‘theoretical' expectation that it will work as a catalyst for development by boosting domestic savings, investment and economic activities. But in ‘practice,' foreign aid has been debated for its performance. Particularly in the...

Hopes for development aid remain high among Western politicians and pundits, but the evidence is depressing. Foreign aid has on average probably no effect on long-run growth. To understand the failure of many development projects, we need a deeper consideration of the failure of top-down...

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...

Linkages between foreign aid, terrorism and natural resource (fuel and iron ore) exports are investigated in this study. The focus is on 78 developing countries with data for the period 1984 to 2008. The generalised method of moment is employed as empirical strategy. Three main foreign aid...

Hezbollah, a Shia Islamist political party and militant group based in Lebanon, is believed to receive a significant amount of informal funding from Iran. In this paper we evaluate whether this funding has had any economically meaningful effect on subnational development in Lebanon. Since the...

This paper discusses past and current social policy strategies in the international aid architecture. From the 1990s, aid strategy and policy shifted to put a stronger emphasis on human development. This accelerated with the Millennium Development Goals and will continue under the Sustainable...