 Counterpart funding requirements and the foreign aid procyclicality puzzleStephane Pallage and Michel Robe Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 2015, vol. 31, issue 3-4, 462-480 Abstract: Official development assistance is a key source of external finance in many developing countries. A striking feature of these aid flows is their positive correlation with business cycles in recipient countries. This pattern is puzzling in that it reinforces recipients’ already strong and costly macroeconomic fluctuations. We propose a simple model of investment financing and aid provision under asymmetric information that rationalizes such a pattern. We assume that donor agencies and recipient governments value projects differently, and that donors know less than recipients do about project characteristics. We show that donors can make a recipient government identify high-return projects by requiring that the latter contribute some of its own funds to projects. Providing these matching grants or ‘counterpart funds’ is less affordable for recipients during economic downturns, which leads to aid procyclicality. Our model produces aid contracts consistent with those used by aid agencies, rationalizes observed aid patterns, and yields a rich set of testable empirical predictions. Date: 2015 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:oxford:v:31:y:2015:i:3-4:p:462-480. Access Statistics for this article Oxford Review of Economic Policy is currently edited by Christopher Adam More articles in Oxford Review of Economic Policy from Oxford University Press and Oxford Review of Economic Policy Limited |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.