Making Progress on Foreign Aid

Nancy Qian

No 10129, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Foreign aid is one of the most important policy tools that rich countries use for helping poor countries to improve population well-being and facilitate economic and institutional development. The empirical evidence on its benefits is mixed and has generated much controversy. This paper presents descriptive statistics which show that foreign aid to very poor countries accounts for very little of total global aid; reviews the evidence that foreign aid is often determined by the objectives of donor countries rather than the needs of recipient countries; argues that the evidence on the impact of aggregate foreign aid is hindered by problems of measurement and identification, which are partly due to the heterogenous nature of aid; and discusses recent studies using natural and randomized experiments to examine narrowed definitions of aid on more disaggregated outcomes.

Keywords: Development; Global poverty; Political economy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP10129 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Making Progress on Foreign Aid (2015)
Working Paper: Making Progress on Foreign Aid (2014)
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:cpr:ceprdp:10129

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP10129

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CEPR ().