Through the Looking-Glass, and What OLS Found There: On Growth, Foreign Aid, and Reverse Causality

David Roodman

No 137, Working Papers from Center for Global Development

Abstract: The cross-country literature on foreign aid effectiveness has relied on the use of instruments to distinguish causality from mere correlation. This paper uses simple non-instrumental techniques in the spirit of Granger to demonstrate that the main aid-growth connection is a negative causal relationship from growth to aid—-aid, that is, as a fraction of recipient GDP. Coarsely, when GDP goes up, aid/GDP goes down. The endogeneity of aid, long suspected, is real. Less understood is that adding certain common controls to regressions puts this relationship through the looking glass, flipping both its sign and apparent direction: aid seems to cause growth. Ideally, instrumentation expunges the endogeneity shown here. In practice, estimates of aid’s impact have run into problems. Autocorrelation in the errors is widespread, and can render endogenous lagged variables used as regressors or instruments. The pitfalls of “difference” and “system” include invalidity and proliferation of instruments. Multicollinearity in term pairs of interest, such as aid and aid2 or “project” and “program” aid, can amplify endogeneity bias. The combination of specification problems and widespread fragility (shown in earlier work) leads to pessimism about the ability of cross-country econometrics to demonstrate aid effectiveness. This does not rule an average positive effect, nor does it contradict the fact that aid has saved millions of lives, but it does suggest that the average effect on economic growth is too small to be detected statistically.

Keywords: foreign aid; economic growth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: B40 F35 O11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2008-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-afr and nep-dev
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (59)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cgdev.org/content/publications/detail/15105

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cgd:wpaper:137

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Center for Global Development Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Publications Manager ().