The UNU-WIDER research programme on foreign aid (ReCom) began in 2010, in a period of strong aid scepticism. Dambisa Moyo’s well-known book, Dead Aid (2009), is just one example. The aid sceptics of the twenty-first century maintained that since economists could not find an aggregate relationship between aid and growth in the data, such a relationship did not exist. In response, the ReCom programme produced considerable literature demonstrating aid effectiveness and the impact of aid on...

In order to reduce poverty you must be able to measure it. It sounds so obvious, but in my experience policy makers think that measuring poverty is either a completely ‘objective’ process, like measuring the temperature in the room, or a broadly flexible exercise that can easily be manipulated to obtain the desired outcomes. And even when the same approach to poverty measurement is used, significant differences remain in the actual process of poverty estimation. As an example,...