Efforts to realize the issue of development-focused Special Drawing Rights (SDR) by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have been on-going for many years. Recently, however, the campaign first gained a new momentum immediately after the Asian financial crises with the new liquidity problems of...

The paper discusses the International Finance Facility (IFF), a joint HM Treasury–DFID proposal to increase development aid substantially for the Millennium Development Goals to be achieved by 2015. The main conclusion of the paper is that the proposed IFF is a promising, forward-looking and...

While we know a lot about how countries become prosperous, we have only begun to understand how aid contributes to economic growth and poverty reduction. The development record is mixed and no robust association between the volume of aid and development performance has been discovered. The...

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...

The Commitment to Development Index of the Center for Global Development rates 21 rich countries on the "development-friendliness" of their policies. It is revised and updated annually. In the 2005 edition, the component on foreign assistance combines quantitative and qualitative measures of...

At the start of the millennium, the international community committed itself to help developing countries achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including through major increases in foreign aid spending. But there are significant differences of opinion about the merits of additional...

This paper examines the nature of aid projections in IMF programs with low-income countries. The authors assess the profile of aid broadly and across regions and investigate the compatibility of IMF projections with commitments made at the 2005 Gleneagles G8 Summit to sharply increase aid. On...

This note was produced as background to the IEO evaluation of the IMF and Aid to Sub-Saharan Africa. It sets out the technical analysis underpinning the evaluation's estimate for spending and absorption ratios and elaborates further on its scope, rationale and limitations. It also presents more...

This study explores whether IMF-supported programs in low-income countries (LICs) catalyze Official Development Assistance (ODA). Based on a comprehensive set of ODA measures and using Propensity Score Matching approach to address selection bias, we show that programs addressing policy or...

The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) has long been controlled by the United States. I show that countries that are politically closely aligned with the United States receive more foreign aid from UNICEF. In addition, UNICEF provides more aid to U.S.-friendly governments in recipient...