This paper studies the sustainability of early childhood education centers established under a large-scale, donor-funded project in rural Indonesia. Analysis of quantitative and qualitative data shows that 86 percent of the centers continued to provide preschool services three years after...

Biodiversity can sometimes only be preserved if natural habitats are excluded from human uses. Such protection measures generate positive externalities at the global scale. This holds especially for protection in developing countries that host great parts of global biodiversity. For...

Nationally implemented protected area measures for biodiversity conservation generate cross-border externalities. For internalizing these externalities at the international level, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) has been established as a multilateral mechanism of transfer. This paper...

The paper examines empirically the proposition that aid to poor countries is detrimental for external competitiveness, giving rise to Dutch disease type effects. At the aggregate level, aid is found to have a positive effect on growth of labour productivity. A sectoral decomposition shows that...

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are widely expected to provide better targeted aid than state agencies with a hidden agenda of commercial and political self-interest. However, principal-agent models question that NGOs decide autonomously on aid allocation. Indeed, we show empirically that...

NGO aid is still widely believed to be superior to official aid (ODA). However, the incentives of NGOs to excel and target aid to the poor and deserving are increasingly disputed. We contribute to the emerging literature on the allocation of NGO aid by performing panel Tobit estimations for...

We show that the impact of foreign aid on bureaucratic quality in recipient countries varies with the mode of delivery. Specifically, grants are found to impair the functioning of the bureaucracy, whereas loans are not. The negative impact of grants is larger when they are given as budget...

Previous literature largely ignores the heterogeneity of aid channels used by each single donor country. We estimate Tobit models to assess the relative importance of recipient need, recipient merit and self-interest of donors for various channels of official and private German aid across a...

In a report presented at the UN Conference on Financing for Development in March 2002, the World Bank claims that the effectiveness of its financial aid has improved substantially by targeting aid at poor developing countries pursuing sound economic policies. However, the World Bank's success...