Foreign aid,institutional quality and economic growth: Evidence from the developing world

This paper examines the effect of sectoral foreign aid and institutional quality on the economic growth of 74 developing countries from Africa, Asia and South America, and covers the period 1980–2016. We consider bilateral aid flows into three sectors, namely education, health and agriculture, and find that among the three types of aid, education aid is more effective for aid-receiving countries. The effect is conditional on the current level of institutional quality and varies substantially across regions. While education aid is more effective in South America, health aid is more effective in Asia and agricultural aid is more effective in Africa. As the level of institutional quality improves, the gap between the marginal effect of education, health and agricultural aids widen. Our findings have strong policy implication for donor countries and international aid organisations, which shows that it is more desirable to shift aid flows towards the education sector as the level of institutional quality improves.     

The effectiveness of aid on savings and investment in Sub-Saharan Africa: do volatility and institutional quality matter?

The effectiveness of aid is somewhat subject to its volatility. This study investigates the impact of aid volatility, especially on savings and investment, with a particular focus on the role of institutional quality in 45 Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries over the period from 1990 to 2013. We used the Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) technique combined with a measure of volatility, namely an averaged data method involving six 4-year sub-periods. Our results suggest that while aid is positively associated with savings and investment, its volatility is harmful to savings and investment. However, when higher quality institutions exist, the volatility of aid has a less negative impact on savings and investment.

The policy implications are diverse; first, donors and SSA aid-dependent countries need to take into account the diversity of shocks to which aid can respond in mitigating its unpredictability. Secondly, SSA countries should be encouraged to establish the conditions for better quality institutions to mitigate the negative effects of the volatility of aid on macroeconomic aggregates such as savings and investment.     

The geography of output volatility

This paper examines the structural determinants of output volatility in developing countries, and especially the roles of geography and institutions. We investigate the volatility effects of market access, climate variability, the geographic predisposition to trade, and various measures of institutional quality. We find an especially important role for market access: remote countries are more likely to have undiversified exports and to experience greater volatility in output growth. Our results are based on Bayesian methods that allow us to address formally the problem of model uncertainty and to examine robustness across a wide range of specifications.     

Aid, Volatility, and Growth Again: When Aid Volatility Matters and When it Does Not

In previous papers the authors have argued that aid is likely to mitigate the negative effects of external shocks on economic growth (i.e. that aid is more effective in countries which are more vulnerable to external shocks). Recently an important debate has emerged about the possible negative effects of aid volatility itself. However, the cushioning effect of aid may involve some volatility in aid flows, which then is not necessarily negative for growth. In this paper the authors examine to what extent the time profile of aid disbursements may contribute to an increase or a decrease of aid effectiveness. They first show that aid, even if volatile, is not clearly as pro-cyclical as is often argued, and, even if pro-cyclical, is not necessarily destabilizing. They measure aid volatility by several methods and assess pro-cyclicality of aid with respect to exports, thus departing from previous literature, which usually assess pro-cyclicality of aid with respect to national income or fiscal receipts. The stabilizing/destabilizing nature of aid is measured by the difference in the volatility of exports and the volatility of the aid plus export flows. Then, in order to take into account the diversity of shocks to which aid can respond, they consider the effect of aid on income volatility and again find that aid is making growth more stable, while its volatility reduces this effect. They finally show through growth regressions that the higher effectiveness of aid in vulnerable countries is to a large extent due to its stabilizing effect.     

Growth, income distribution, and fiscal policy volatility

The relationship between income distribution and economic growth has long been an important economic research subject. Despite substantial evidence on the negative impact on long-term growth of inequality in the literature, however, there is not much consensus on the specific channels through which inequality affects growth. The empirical validity of two most prominent political economy channels - redistributive fiscal spending and taxes, and sociopolitical instability - has recently been challenged. We advance a new political economy channel for the negative link between inequality and growth, a fiscal policy volatility channel, and present strong supporting econometric evidence in a large sample of countries over the period of 1960-2000. Our finding also sheds light on another commonly observed negative relation between macroeconomic volatility and growth. We carefully address the robustness of the results in terms of data, estimation methods, outlier problem, and endogeneity problem that often plague the standard OLS (ordinary least squares) regression.     

Endogenous strength of intellectual property rights: Implications for economic development and growth

The key institution that determines sustained growth in R&D-based growth models is the strength of intellectual property rights, which are usually assumed to be exogenous. In this paper we endogenize the strength of the intellectual property rights and show how private incentives to protect these rights affect economic development and growth. Our model explains endogenous differences in intellectual property rights across countries as private incentives to invest in property rights generate multiple equilibria. We show that the resulting institutional threshold offers an explanation for why the effect of a transfer of institutions from one country to another depends on the quality of the institutions that were imported.     

On the channel and type of aid: The case of international disaster assistance

The aim of this paper is to determine the drivers of a donor's decision on the composition of aid. We apply a dataset on international post-disaster assistance between 2000 and 2007 that includes information on the channel (bilateral vs. multilateral) and type (cash vs. in-kind) of each aid flow. Our results suggest that the choice of the channel and type of disaster assistance is mainly determined by humanitarian aspects, strategic interests and institutional quality. Moreover, we find differences in the allocation behavior between OECD and non-OECD countries.     

Do better institutions offset the adverse effect of a financial crisis on investment? Evidence from East Asia

We extend the neoclassical investment theory to capture the deviation of current institutional quality from its ideal level. We show that an improvement in institutions increases the speed of adjustment towards desired capital stock and the marginal product of capital and hence enhances the investment demand. Next, we apply our theoretical model to East Asia. Using Generalized Method of Moments, we estimate a dynamic panel data model to investigate the effect of alternate measures of institutional quality on investment dynamics in this region. Our findings underline the role of institutions as a deep determinant of investment. We also conclude that the East Asian countries with better institutional quality are less prone to the adverse effects of financial crises on their fixed capital formation. Our results are robust to the estimation methods and changes in institutional measures and hence might have important policy implication for policymakers and investors in East Asia.     

Aid,institutions and economic growth in sub‐Saharan Africa: Heterogeneous donors and heterogeneous responses

This study contributes to the aid‐effectiveness debate using panel data from 43 sub‐Saharan African countries over the period 1980–2013. Its novelty lies in assessing the intermediary role of institutions and the importance of recipient and donor heterogeneity. The long‐run growth effect of (aggregate) aid from “traditional” donors is robustly non‐positive, and the indirect effect is negative. Disaggregation reveals donor heterogeneity. Chinese aid outperforms aggregate aid from traditional donors with respect to growth; however, it has a negative institutional effect. Recipient heterogeneity is largely a short‐run phenomenon, with only a few countries showing some deviations from shared long‐run parameter sets. Comparing donor behavior suggests that the future of aid would benefit more from focusing on quality – particularly, specialization and donor alignment.     

Foreign aid and the quality of economic institutions

Identification of the causal effect that foreign aid has on the quality of institutions in recipient countries has been elusive in the aid effectiveness literature. The main reason is that aid is endogenous with respect to the development of institutions. Our paper examines the impact of foreign aid on economic freedom in the recipient countries at a disaggregated level using an innovative identifying strategy. To do so, we use recently innovated instruments for aid, exploiting the long lags between loan approval and disbursements by official creditors to developing countries. Using plausibly exogenous variations in predicted loan disbursements as instruments for actual aid, we find that foreign aid has a significant positive effect on the quality of economic institutions in recipient countries. The results are robust to alternative specifications and samples. By establishing the existence of a strong link between aid and the quality of economic institutions, we identify the main channel through which aid affects economic growth and development.     

Growth in a time of external imbalances

Globalization and financial integration have increased in the last three decades giving rise to cumulated large external imbalances. The question we address in this paper is whether economic growth can be affected by these external imbalances. We estimate an augmented growth equation with the external stock position of the countries measured by the net foreign asset position. Unlike previous literature, we use non-parametric methods that capture non-linearities and heterogeneity, and apply them to a sample that includes 106 developed and developing countries for the period 1983-2011. Contrary to the neoclassical theory, we find that improvements in the external position foster growth. Our results are in line with current theoretical contributions explaining the Lucas Paradox where financial frictions are present. Within this framework, the general outcome should be a positive sign and the “neoclassical” negative relationship between net foreign assets and growth would be just a particular case, with no universal explanatory mechanism. Accordingly, we find that the effect of the net foreign asset position on growth is heterogeneous, the impact depending on the characteristics of the countries such as institutional quality, openness and financial development.     

Terms of trade volatility,government spending cyclicality,and economic growth

This paper presents estimates of the effects that terms of trade volatility has on real gross domestic product (GDP) per capita growth. Based on 5‐year nonoverlapping panel data comprising 175 countries during 1980 to 2010, the paper finds that terms of trade volatility has significant negative effects on economic growth in countries with procyclical government spending. In countries where government spending is countercyclical, terms of trade volatility has no significant effect on growth. Conditional on the mediating role of government spending cyclicality, the GDP share of domestic credit to the private sector has no significant effect on the relationship between growth and terms of trade volatility.     

Aid volatility and poverty traps

This paper studies the impact of aid volatility in a two-period model where production may occur with either a traditional or a modern technology. Public spending is productive and “time to build” requires expenditure in both periods for the modern technology to be used. The possibility of a poverty trap induced by high aid volatility is first examined in a benchmark case where taxation is absent. The analysis is then extended to account for self insurance (taking the form of a first-period contingency fund) financed through taxation. An increase in aid volatility is shown to raise the optimal contingency fund. But if future aid also depends on the size of the contingency fund (as a result of a moral hazard effect on donors' behavior), the optimal policy may entail no self insurance.     

The geography of output volatility

This paper examines the structural determinants of output volatility in developing countries, and especially the roles of geography and institutions. We investigate the volatility effects of market access, climate variability, the geographic predisposition to trade, and various measures of institutional quality. We find an especially important role for market access: remote countries are more likely to have undiversified exports and to experience greater volatility in output growth. Our results are based on Bayesian methods that allow us to address formally the problem of model uncertainty and to examine robustness across a wide range of specifications.     

Distance and beyond: What drives financial flows to emerging economies?

A major theme in the empirical literature is whether country-specific ‘pull’ or external ‘push’ factors drive international capital flows. In this paper we show that pull-push interactions matter: the response of international investors to country-specific developments depends on global volatility/liquidity stress conditions. We model asset-trade behaviour of investors: with limited information, strong institutional quality ‘pulls’ asset demand; mounting tensions in global markets amplify portfolio adjustments. We derive an empirically testable equation for cross-border bank flows to emerging economies (EMEs) and focus on pull-push interactions that trigger financial vulnerabilities. We find that global volatility amplifies demand for institutional quality, prior to the recent crisis, implying that EMEs with weak institutional settings are exposed to sharp capital retrenchments. In the aftermath of the crisis, the liquidity easing in advanced economies drives down concerns for EMEs' developments, boosting flows and challenging EMEs' ability to use capital controls to mitigate unbridled flows.     

Does the version of the Penn World Tables matter? An analysis of the relationship between growth and volatility

Abstract .  The Penn World Tables (PWT) are an important data source for cross-country comparisons in economics. The PWT have undergone several revisions over time. This paper documents how countries' output growth rates change across four publicly available versions of the PWT. We show that for some countries the magnitude of the differences is significant and/or the sign of the growth rates changes across versions. Using as an example Ramey and Ramey (1995) , who found growth volatility has a significant negative effect on growth, we demonstrate that conclusions based on one version of the PWT may not hold under another version.     

Aid and institutions in transition economies

We investigate whether aid contributed to institutional development in transition economies. We find that aid flows have a positive effect on democratization, especially on constraints on the executive and political participation. At the same time, total aid has no effect on overall quality of governance, while US aid appears to have a negative impact on some dimensions of governance. Aid’s differential impact on democracy and governance is consistent with uneven development of institutions and the democracy consolidation hypothesis. We also find that aid has a non-linear effect on democracy. Openness has a positive effect on both democracy and good governance. Oil resources have an adverse effect on democracy. Adult mortality, civil war and adherence to Islam are all detrimental to good governance.     

TRADER TYPE EFFECTS ON THE VOLATILITY‐VOLUME RELATIONSHIP EVIDENCE FROM THE KOSPI 200 INDEX FUTURES MARKET

We investigate whether the trading activity generated by investors with different access to information and trading motives has positive or negative impact on index futures volatility. Surprises in non‐member institutional, individual and foreign investors' trading volume are positively associated with volatility in most of the cases. For member institutional investors, unexpected trading volume is positively related to volatility. Long‐run changes in the trading activity also affect volatility differently across trader types. Finally, allowing for time‐to‐maturity effects, surprises in open interest are associated with more volatility towards contract expiration, contrary to the negative effect we find during normal times.     

CROSS-COUNTRY EVIDENCE ON OUTPUT GROWTH VOLATILITY: NONSTATIONARY VARIANCE AND GARCH MODELS

This paper revisits the issue of conditional volatility in real gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates for Canada, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Previous studies find high persistence in the volatility. This paper shows that this finding largely reflects a nonstationary variance. Output growth in the six countries became noticeably less volatile over the past few decades. In this paper, we employ the modified iterated cumulative sum of squares (ICSS) algorithm to detect structural change in the variance of output growth. One structural break exists in each of the six countries after identifying outliers and mean shifts in the growth rates. We then use generalized autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity (GARCH) specifications, modeling output growth and its volatility with and without the break in volatility. The evidence shows that the time-varying variance falls sharply in Canada and Japan, and disappears entirely in Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom and the United States, once we incorporate the break in the variance equation of output for the six countries. That is, the integrated GARCH (IGARCH) effect proves spurious and the GARCH model demonstrates misspecification, if researchers neglect a nonstationary variance. Moreover, we also consider the possible effects of our more correct measure of output volatility on output growth as well as the reverse effect of output growth on its volatility. The conditional standard deviation possesses no statistical significance in all countries, except a significant negative effect in Japan. The lagged growth rate of output produces significant negative and positive effects on the conditional variances in Germany and Japan, respectively. No significant effects exist in Canada, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the United States.     

Product market competition,R&D composition and growth

We revisit the relation between product market competition and leading-edge growth in a model where horizontal and vertical innovations simultaneously occur. We show that competition exerts an important effect on the composition of aggregate R&D (vertical versus horizontal). In fact, when product market competition gets more intense, a larger fraction of R&D is engaged in improving the quality of products; this occurs at the expense of a lower rate of horizontal innovation. This effect, which is absent in the basic endogenous growth model with only vertical innovations, may overturn the inverse relation between product market competition and leading-edge growth found in prior theoretical models.