Forced to Freedom? Empirical Relations between Aid and Economic Freedom

Tobias Knedlik and Franz Kronthaler

No 8/2006, IWH Discussion Papers from Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH)

Abstract: The paper explores the relationships between economic freedom on the one side and development aid and IMF credit as approximation for conditional aid on the other side. After a short review of current literature on the issue of economic development, economic freedom, aid, and IMF credit, the paper develops a simple panel regression model to evaluate the relationship between “economic freedom” as dependent variable and “aid” and “IMF credit” as independent variables. The estimation is based upon data taken from the World Bank’s World Development Indicators and the Heritage Index of Economic Freedom. In contrast to previous research, our results allow the rejection of the hypothesis that IMF credit increases economic freedom and that aid is not contributing to economic freedom. The estimation results suggest that, firstly, aid is positively correlated with economic freedom, and secondly, that IMF credit is negatively correlated with economic freedom. Taking IMF credit as proxy for conditional aid, we conclude that for the period of observation it could not be shown that countries can be forced to economic freedom by aid conditions.

Keywords: Ökonomische Freiheit; Entwicklungshilfe; IMF-Kredite; wirtschaftliche Entwicklung; aid; economic freedom; IMF credit; economic development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F35 O19 P10 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2006
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/23753/1/8-06.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Forced to Freedom? Empirical relations between aid and economic freedom (2007)
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:zbw:iwhdps:iwh-8-06

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IWH Discussion Papers from Halle Institute for Economic Research (IWH) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().