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Publications (97)
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We investigate the marginal productivity of investment across countries. The aim is to estimate the return on investments financed by foreign aid and by domestic resource mobilization, using aggregate data. Both returns are expected to vary across countries and time. Consequently we develop a...
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– Finn Church Aid’s Secondment in Somalia
Donors face distinct challenges in operating in fragile states and supporting the building of state capacity. This paper explores one type of assistance – the ‘embedding’ of highly-skilled staff members within local government agencies – through a unique case study of Finn Church Aid’s experience...
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Understanding chronic poverty and its evolution is complex given the amount of information involved. This paper proposes a new approach to analysing the evolution of chronic poverty in a multivariate setting using a Shapley decomposition of a multidimensional chronic poverty measure proposed by...
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Rwanda and Burundi have both emerged from civil wars over the past 20 years and foreign donors have provided significant contributions to post-conflict reconstruction and development in the two countries. Yet although Rwanda and Burundi share several important characteristics, the social, political...
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Does foreign aid promote aggregate economic growth? In contrast to widespread perceptions, academic studies of this question have been rapidly converging towards a positive answer. We employ a simulation approach to (i) validate the coherence of recent empirics and (ii) calculate plausible ranges...
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China’s importance as a major donor outside the traditional Western donors has been increasing and this has helped to bridge the funding gaps in developing countries. At the same time, South-South financial assistance still comes with less conditionality making China’s aid model different to Western...
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– Public Financial Management Reforms in Sierra Leone
Since the end of the civil war, the Government of Sierra Leone has made substantial progress in strengthening public financial management. Improvements have been achieved across all aspects of the budget cycle and are particularly notable with regard to budget execution functions. The main factors...
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Growth and poverty reduction in Africa are weakly linked. This paper argues that the reason is that Africa has failed to create enough good jobs. Structural transformation―the relative growth of employment in high productivity sectors―has not featured in Africa’s post-1995 growth story. As a result...
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– Implications for Patron-Client Relationships in the Context of Bangladesh’s Agricultural Reformation
This paper investigates how a development intervention which targets extremely poor households with investment capital influences relationships between those households and the landowning elite. It places this investigation in the context of the ‘agricultural reformation’ of rural Bangladesh...
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– Comparing Indonesia and Nigeria
This paper analyses the role of foreign aid to assist development in two oil-rich countries: Indonesia and Nigeria. This paper seeks to understand the way foreign aid provided assistance to transform Indonesia from a ‘fragile’ state in the 1960s into one of the ‘Asian Tigers’ in the mid-1990s, and...
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Agriculture plays an important role in terms of employment and its contribution to gross domestic product in many African countries. Thus, any policy initiative targeted towards poverty reduction in Africa should consider the agricultural sector as the major priority area. Unfortunately, the sector...
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– Evidence from a Panel Threshold Framework
The aid-growth literature has been explored using a wide range of econometric methodologies. The evidence of the effectiveness of aid to promote economic growth is mixed, suggesting that the link between aid and growth is complex and may not be well identified by traditional methods. We take another...
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Why are some countries more successful at carrying out post-conflict reconstruction programmes than others? Why has Sierra Leone been more successful in the reform of its armed forces than Liberia has after the end of the Mano River Basin wars? This paper argues that the diverging outcomes are...
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– The Case of Somali-Inhabited Eastern Horn of Africa
Institution-building in Somalia has met with high levels of failure for two decades. But successes have occurred in other Somali-inhabited regions of the eastern Horn, and have been especially present at the local and municipal level. The most effective aid to institution-building in Somalia has...
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– a Simultaneous-Equation Model
This paper investigates the impact of foreign aid on economic growth in member countries of the Economic Community of West African States using panel data for 1990-2009 and a three equation simultaneous-equations model. The effect of foreign aid on economic growth among these ECOWAS countries was...
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– Uganda
This paper seeks to (i) establish the areas in which aid from the major donors is concentrated; (ii) examine how aid has been allocated to the environmental sectors, and (iii) review the factors behind the success of environmental projects. Using data from the Aiddata.org database, the distribution...
Displaying 16 of 97 results