What Determines Foreign Aid to Papua New Guinea? An Inter-temporal Model of Aid Allocation

foreign aid, allocation, Papua New Guinea, time-series

Aid, Public Sector Fiscal Behaviour and Developing Country Debt

aid, borrowing, debt, fiscal behaviour

AN EXAMINATION OF THE LONG-RUN TRENDS AND RECENT DEVELOPMENTS IN FOREIGN AID

This paper documents trends in official development assistance (ODA) over the last three decades. It examines trends in both aid amounts and the quality of aid. It finds that the real value of ODA has declined during the 1990s following two decades of relative stability. The share of foreign aid to Sub-Saharan Africa has fallen during the 1990s and aid flows to low-income countries have also declined, partly as a result of the diversion of aid flows to transition economies and ¡®trouble spots¡¯. The paper also finds that donor aid programs are thinly spread over many recipients. However, reductions in aid amounts have been accompanied by improvements in the quality of aid. The financial terms of aid have improved and there has been a move towards the untying of aid.Official Development Assistance, Bilateral Aid, Multilateral Aid

Aid and Growth in Fragile States

The literature on aid has come a long way in recent years, and as a result we now know much more about aid effectiveness than possibly ever before. But significant gaps in knowledge remain. One such gap is the effectiveness of aid in the so-called ?fragile states?, countries with critically low policy and institutional performance ratings. The current paper addresses this void by examining possible links between aid and economic growth in fragile states. It finds that: (i) growth would have been 1.4 percentage points lower in highly fragile states in the absence of aid to them, compared to 2.5 percentage points in other countries; (ii) highly fragile states from a per capita income growth perspective can only efficiently absorb approximately one-third of the amounts of aid that other countries can, and; (iii) while from the same perspective most fragile states are under-aided, to the extent that they could efficiently absorb greater amounts of aid than they currently receive, many of the highly fragile states are substantially over-aided in this sense. The overall conclusion is that donors need to look very closely at their aid to the sub-set of fragile states deemed in this paper as highly fragile.foreign aid, economic growth, fragile states, policies, absorptive capacity

Aid and Public Sector Fiscal Behaviour in Failing States

This paper looks at interactions between foreign aid and the public sector in developing countries, especially those considered to be fragile or failing states. A model is proposed which employs actual budgetary appropriations and revenue estimates (rather than estimated target variables) and allows for asymmetric preference. Variants of the model are estimated using time-series data for Papua New Guinea (PNG). PNG is classified as a fragile state by the international community owing to perceived policy and institutional inadequacies. Results obtained suggest that foreign aid increases consumption and investment expenditures and decreases tax revenues and the level of borrowing.Foreign aid, taxes, public spending, fungibility, fragile states, failing states, Papua New Guinea

Education, poverty and the millennium development goals

No abstract availabl

Scaling-up foreign aid : will the \u27Big Push\u27 work?

International donors are substantially scaling-up aid programmes. At the same time, there are widespread reservations over how much aid recipient countries can use effectively. Such concerns are supported by the aid effectiveness literature which finds that there are limits to the amounts of aid recipients can efficiently absorb. This article demonstrates that a ‘big push’ in foreign aid will not lead to diminishing returns as long as donors get the inter-country allocation of aid right. This is true even if donors provide aid at levels equal to the well-known target of 0.7 per cent of their gross national incom

Do pacific countries receive too much foreign aid?

No abstract availabl

Old challenges and new opportunities for the MDGs : now and beyond 2015

As we approach the 2015 date by which the Millenium Development Goals (MDGs) are to be achieved, there is increasing scrutiny as to the progress towards their achievement. The MDGs were intended to be global targets and not necessarily to be assessed at the country level. In other words, countries were to contribute to the global targets but not be held to account against them, as they were originally conceived. In practice though, countries are assessed against the global MDG targets. It is appropriate that continuing interest be paid to the achievement of the MDGs, however it is also necessary that the global community now start to turn its attention to what framework for addressing the world\u27s development needs beyond the MDG timeframe following 2015. The ‘poverty landscape’ has changed significantly in the last decade – partly as a result of the international community\u27s focus on the MDGs – and so it is necessary that a new approach to poverty alleviation reflect this changed reality. This paper introduces a range of papers presented at an international conference on the MDGs that critically analyse the current MDGs and pose questions as to how should we follow the MDGs beyond 2015