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This paper analyzes the impact of foreign aid on growth. It differs from the existing literature in at least two important ways. First, we differentiate between foreign aid as technical assistance and non-technical assistance, and demonstrate both theoretically and empirically that this distinction is important. Second, we test the hypothesis that the effectiveness of aid depends on its level of fragmentation. To preview our main results: non-technical assistance has no statistically significant impact on growth; but technical assistance has a positive and significant impact, except in countries where it is highly fragmented.

We show that donors that maximize relative aid impact spread their budgets across many recipient countries in a unique Nash equilibrium. This aid fragmentation result is robust to the introduction of fixed costs, even if they are improbably large. In equilibrium, smaller donors have less fragmented aid, and behave better from an efficiency viewpoint. We present evidence that our theoretical results are in line with crosscountry correlations. Our analysis has important policy implications: First, short of ending donors' maximization of relative aid impact, agreements to better coordinate aid allocations are not implementable. Second, since policies to increase donor competition in terms of aid effectiveness risk reinforcing relativeness, they may well backfire, as any such reinforcement increases aid fragmentation.

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