Aid,Policy and Growth: Does Aid Modality Matter?

This paper contributes to the empirics of aid and growth by investigating whether aid modality matters in explaining its effectiveness. For this purpose, we include the four main aid modalities (project aid, financial program aid, technical assistance grants, and food aid) as explanatory variables in an endogenous growth model. We find that project aid affects positively and significantly growth, albeit with diminishing returns. Our results also show that financial program aid generally impacts on growth negatively, while the impacts of technical assistance and food aid are statistically insignificant. Moreover, we find that climate-related conditions influence the effect of project aid. JEL no.  C2, F3     

Aid and trade

This paper surveys the recent theoretical and empirical literaturethat explores the relations between aid and trade and asks aboutthe complementarity or substitution effects at work. We distinguishbetween the effects of aid on trade flows and on trade policies,of the donor as well as the recipient countries. Special focusis given on trade facilitation, or ‘aid for trade’.     

Business Cycle Fluctuations,Large Macroeconomic Shocks,and Development Aid

We examine the cyclical properties of development aid using bilateral data for 22 donors and 113 recipients during 1970–2005. We find that bilateral aid flows are on average procyclical with respect to the business cycle in both donor and recipient countries. While aid outlays contract sharply during severe downturns in donor countries, they rise steeply when aid-receiving countries experience large adverse shocks. Our findings suggest that development aid may play an important cushioning role in developing countries, but only during times of severe macroeconomic stress. Our results are robust to alternate definitions of aid flows, specifications, and estimation techniques.     

制度质量、对外援助和受援国经济增长

对外援助是中国推动"一带一路"建设,加强与沿线国家双边合作的重要举措之一。文章采用2000～2014年中国对外援助的面板数据,在考虑援助的内生性及使用全球治理指数的基础上,实证研究了中国对外援助和制度质量对受援国经济增长的影响。实证研究结果表明:中国对外援助尤其是基础设施援助能够有效促进受援国的经济增长;良好的制度建设是受援国经济增长的重要保障;分样本回归显示,受援国制度质量能够显著影响中国对外援助尤其是经济基础设施援助的经济增长效应,这一效应在亚欧受援国表现明显;拓展分析发现中国对外援助和OECD国家对外援助呈现出"1+1>2"的效果。为提升中国对外援助的效果和质量,中国需要改进对外援助结构,加强对援助项目实施过程的监督,减少受援国制度风险的影响。     

Aid Quality and Donor Rankings

This paper offers new measures of aid quality covering 38 bilateral and multilateral donors, as well as new insights about the robustness and usefulness of such measures. The 2005 Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness and the follow-up 2008 Accra Agenda for Action have focused attention on common donor practices that reduce the development impact of aid. Using 18 underlying indicators that capture these practices—derived from the OECD-DAC’s Survey for Monitoring the Paris Declaration, the new AidData database, and the DAC aid tables—the authors construct an overall aid quality index and four coherently defined sub-indexes on aid selectivity, alignment, harmonization, and specialization. Compared with earlier indicators used in donor rankings, this indicator set is more comprehensive and representative of the range of donor practices addressed in the Paris Declaration, improving the validity, reliability, and robustness of rankings. One of the innovations is to increase the validity of the aid quality indicators by adjusting for recipient characteristics, donor aid volumes, and other factors. Despite these improvements in data and methodology, the authors caution against overinterpretation of overall indexes such as these. Alternative plausible assumptions regarding weights or the inclusion of additional indicators can still produce marked shifts in the ranking of some donors, so that small differences in overall rankings are not meaningful. Moreover, because the performance of some donors varies considerably across the four sub-indexes, these sub-indexes may be more useful than the overall index in identifying donors’ relative strengths and weaknesses.