Do women benefit from women education aid? Evidence from panel data

Abstract

Most of the aid literature focuses on the potential growth effects of aggregate aid, with mixed results. Considering that donors have repeatedly asserted the multidimensionality of their purposes, a much-disaggregated analysis of aid effectiveness is necessary. The effect of women education aid is examined empirically for 72 developing countries during the period 1990–2016. The effectiveness of aid targeted to women education is assessed here within the framework of cross-country regression. This analysis exploits an instrumental variable since donors provide large amount of women education aid to countries which have similar voting positions in the United Nations General Assembly. The results show that women education aid has a significantly positive effect on women’s education. This result is robust with different sensitivity checks. The finding has strong policy implications for donor countries and international aid organisations, such as it helps identify the most effective types of foreign aid flow to various economic sectors of the recipient countries.