Search

Acknowledging that aid proliferation and a lack of coordination impair aid effectiveness, donors have repeatedly promised to specialize and better coordinate their aid activities, notably in the Paris Declaration of 2005. We exploit data on the exact location of aid projects in Malawi to assess whether the country's bilateral and multilateral donors have acted accordingly at the district and sector level. We do not find compelling evidence for increased aid specialization after the Paris Declaration, and the regional division of labour among donors may even have deteriorated. Our within-country evidence thus broadly corroborates what previous studies have found at the national level of recipient countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The accountability of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has various dimensions. From an economic perspective, official financiers, private donors as well as aid recipients could expect more charitable output from NGOs, if less efficient organizations were squeezed out of international development activities. We consider administrative overheads as an important aspect of NGO efficiency. Our empirical analysis focuses on the effects of administrative overheads, public funding and the interrelations between these two factors on the probability of “market” exit for almost 900 US based NGOs with overseas aid activities since the mid-1980s. We find that larger administrative overheads increase the probability of exit for NGOs receiving any public funding. However, this effect weakens with increasing shares of public funding of NGOs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advanced OECD countries are widely held responsible for containing global carbon emissions by providing financial and technical support to developing economies where emissions are increasing most rapidly. It is open to question, however, whether more generous official development assistance would help fight climate change effectively. Empirical evidence on the effects of foreign aid on energy and carbon emission intensities in recipient countries hardly exists. We contribute to closing this gap by considering energy use and carbon emissions as dependent climate-related variables and the volume and structure of aid as possible determinants. In particular, we assessed the impact of aid that donors classify to be specifically related to energy issues. We performed dynamic panel Generalised Method of Moments and Least Squares Dummy Variable Corrected estimations. We found that aid tends to be effective in reducing the energy intensity of GDP in recipient countries. All the same, the carbon intensity of energy use is hardly affected. Scaling up aid efforts would thus be insufficient to fight climate change beyond improving energy efficiency. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper examines the long-run effect of foreign aid on income inequality for 21 recipient countries using panel cointegration techniques to control for omitted variable and endogeneity bias. We find that aid exerts an inequality increasing effect on income distribution. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights • The Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness didn't change donor behavior consistently. • Overall aid concentration generally declined and selectivity weakened. • The poverty orientation of most bilateral donors strengthened slightly. • The allocation of aid did not become more merit-based. • The importance of donor exports for aid allocation did not generally decline. Abstract In the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness of 2005 and related initiatives donor countries promised to render foreign aid more effective, inter alia, by increasingly concentrating aid on particularly needy recipient countries with relatively good governance. In this study, we re-consider the question of whether bilateral and multilateral donors have adjusted their aid allocation accordingly. We track the changes in different margins of Theil indices of aid concentration between 1995–2004 and 2006–2015. We do so for the aggregate aid of the two groups of bilateral DAC donors and multilateral donors as well as for nine major individual DAC donors. According to our findings, the Paris Declaration did not change donors' aid allocation systematically and consistently. Overall aid concentration has declined for the two donor groups as well as for the majority of individual DAC donors. In contrast to multilateral aid, bilateral aid has become slightly more concentrated on poorer recipient countries. Still most donors have become less selective in granting aid to higher income countries. Furthermore, the Paris Declaration did not help improve the merit-based allocation of aid. Finally, there is no compelling evidence suggesting that donors have become less self-interested in using aid as a means to promote their own exports. These results suggest that commitments to reward better governed recipients and not to misuse aid as an export-promotion tool appear to be particularly hard to enforce. Overall, the gap between donor rhetoric and actual aid allocation persists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: This article provides a survey of the aid budget literature and examines the determinants of the development aid efforts of 22 Development Assistance Committee (DAC) members over the 1976–2011 period. In fixed effects regressions, we identify aid inertia, per-capita GDP, the creation of an independent aid agency, colonial history, Russian military capacity, peer effects, terror incidents, aid to CEEC/NIS countries, and imports from developing countries as determinants of the Official Development Assistance (ODA)-to-GNI ratio. Excluding donor fixed effects, several variables, including colonial history and the aid agency dummy, are no longer significant; the impact of per-capita GDP gets weaker, while donors’ budget deficits decrease aid effort. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]