Aid allocation and poverty reduction

Abstract

In the actual allocation of aid, aid tapers out with reform.Aid now lifts about 30 million people a year out of absolute poverty. With a poverty-efficient allocation, the same amount of aid would lift about 80 million people out of poverty.

Economic aid to post-conflict countries: a methodological critique of Collier and Hoeffler

“…11 Criticism on methodological grounds, as well as the policy implications of channelling aid only to countries that adopt "good" policies, has been made by Tarp (2000, 2001), McPhe rson (2000), Dalgaard and Hansen (2001), Dayton-Johnson andHoddinott (2001, 2003), Guillaumont and Chauvet (2001), Lensink and White (2001), Lu and Ram (2001), Akhand and Gupta (2002), and Easterly, Levine and Roodman (2003). By contrast, the study by Collier and Dollar (2002) supports Dollar (1997, 2000).…”

“…If post-conflict conditions generate particularistic relations between aid and growth, however, the same pattern might be expected with respect to growth and poverty. On the growth-and-poverty relationship, however, C&H 2004 assume that post-conflict countries conform to the general pattern that Collier and Dollar (2002) found for all countries. Although C&H do not directly test the relationship between growth and poverty on their post-conflict sample, they nevertheless conclude with recommendations regarding the optimal level of aid to produce "poverty-efficient" growth in post-conflict countries (p.14).…”

“…Indeed, they acknowledge as much elsewhere in the paper, in a slightly different context. Referring to the Collier-Dollar (2002) study which they use for growth data, they note, "There are only eight countries in the Collier-Dollar sample that have completed this peace period and such a sample is evidently too small for the approach" (p. 9). As a result, it is "unfortunately not feasible to investigate the effects during the second full peace episode" (p.9).…”

Distributing development assistance for health: simulating the implications of 11 criteria

“…However, surprisingly few studies have examined the potential distributional implications of a wide range of aid allocation criteria, including the consequences for countries and country categories of using various criteria to a greater extent than today (Llavador and Roemer, 2001;Collier and Dollar, 2002;McGillivray, 2004;Guillaumont, 2008;Guillaumont et al, 2015). Moreover, no study, to our knowledge, has done this in the specific context of health and the distribution of DAH, although recent work for the Equitable Access Initiative has examined how the classification of countries may change with different criteria (Global Fund, 2016).…”

Absorptive Capacity and Achieving the MDGs

“…2 There is ample evidence that many low-income countries suffer from capacity constraints and that the potential benefits from additional aid may often be constrained by weak capacity, frequently failing to meet intended objectives. Several empirical cross-country studies (Collier and Dollar 2002;Hansen and Tarp 2001;Radelet et al 2004) show that after a certain level additional aid to GDP has little effect on growth. This 'saturation point' is a function of different proxies for absorptive capacity arising from macroeconomic, institutional, infrastructure, human capital, or sociocultural constraints .…”