Impact of development aid on infant mortality: Micro‐level evidence from Côte d'Ivoire

Abstract

The empirical literature has failed to reach consensus on the impact of aid on development outcomes based on aggregate crosscountry analysis. This study follows the current trend in the literature on the effectiveness of aid to examine the impact of local-level aid on health outcomes. We combine data on World Bank's geo-located aid projects with three rounds of Demographic Health Surveys from Côte d'Ivoire and use difference-indifference estimation techniques to explore the effects of aid on infant mortality. We find that proximity to development aid projects is associated with reduced infant mortality. The results hold whether we consider proximity to any aid project or specifically to water and sanitation projects. They are also robust to inclusion of mother fixed-effects in the model. The evidence suggests that access to prenatal and postnatal health care are possible mechanisms through which aid may affect infant mortality.

Chinese Aid and Health at the Country and Local Level

“…We however compare the effect of Chinese aid to those of the World Bank, for 1 We are the first to investigate the causal effect of aid on health at the sub-national level for a large number of countries spreading across different continents. Sub-national studies we are aware of focus on infant mortality in Nigeria (Kotsadam et al 2018) and Côte d'Ivoire (Wayoro and Ndikumana 2019), health outcomes and perceived healthcare quality in Malawi (De andBecker 2015, Marty et al 2017), and the disease burden and severity in Uganda (Odokonyero et al 2018). Most closely related to this paper is Martorano et al (2020) who investigate the effect of Chinese aid on household welfare, focusing on 13 countries in Sub-Sahara Africa, and report positive correlations between Chinese aid and lower infant mortality in a difference-in-differences framework.…”

Does aid matter for FDI in ECOWAS: Investigating the infrastructure channel

“…Following the failure of many aid programs and the increasing recognition by the donor community of the difficulties of this type of aid in inducing accelerated development, there has been a resurgence of theoretical and empirical studies focusing on how to increase aid effectiveness. Some of the 1990s works include Feenstra and Hanson (1997), while Hoeffler and Outram (2011) and Wayoro and Ndikumana (2019) represent some recent studies. Interestingly, a number of contemporaneous and empirically robust studies on the nexus between aid, FDI, infrastructure and growth have been documented and published by the African Development Review of the African Development Bank (see e.g., Adedokun, 2017;Cai et al, 2018;Malikane & Chitambara, 2017;Page & Soderbom, 2015;Younsi et al, 2017; among others; Figure 4).…”

Does decentralization encourage pro-poor targeting? Evidence from Kenya’s constituencies development fund

“…The paper also speaks to the broader literature on aid targeting (Briggs 2014;Jablonski 2014;Öhler and Nunnenkamp 2014;Nunnenkamp et al 2016;Briggs 2017;Öhler et al 2019;Dipendra 2020;Wayoro and Ndikumana 2020)-especially the subset of that literature that employs highly disaggregated local data on project placement alongside covariates measured at the micro-level (Chhibber and Jensenius 2016;Carlitz 2017;Hoffmann et al 2017;Briggs 2018a,b;Ejdemyr et al 2018;Murray 2020;Brierley 2021). While our study joins these others in leveraging highly disaggregated data, the degree of disaggregation offered by our point-level empirical approach (described below) goes well beyond that of other research.…”