Minding the Gap: Aid Effectiveness, Project Ratings and Contextualization

Diana Goldemberg, Luke Simon Jordan and Thomas Kenyon

No 10532, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: This paper applies novel techniques to long-standing questions of aid effectiveness. It first replicates findings that donor finance is discernibly but weakly associated with sector outcomes in recipient countries. It then shows robustly that donors' own ratings of project success provide limited information on the contribution of those projects to development outcomes. By training a machine learning model on World Bank projects, the paper shows instead that the strongest predictor of these projects’ contribution to outcomes is their degree of adaptation to country context, and the largest differences between ratings and actual impact occur in large projects in institutionally weak settings.

Date: 2023-07-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-fdg and nep-ppm
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/09943400 ... fb20d9cc719ef84a.pdf (application/pdf)

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:wbk:wbrwps:10532

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank 1818 H Street, N.W., Washington, DC 20433. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Roula I. Yazigi ().