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Foreign Aid and Fiscal Policy

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Author Info
Faini, Riccardo

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Abstract

Foreign aid has been on a downward trend since at least the early eighties. Despite the commitments of donor governments, the GDP share of foreign aid for DAC countries has fallen to slightly more than 0,2% in the early part of this decade. The purpose of this paper is to explore the macro determinants of the amount of foreign aid. Surprisingly enough, not much attention has been devoted in the literature to this issue. Most of the research has focussed either on the effectiveness of aid (“does aid promote growth and help alleviating poverty”?) or to the cross country allocation of a given amount of foreign aid (“is foreign aid motivated by donor’s political and commercial interests or by recipients’ needs?”). In both cases, the total aid budget is taken as given and its determinants remain therefore unexplored. Our main finding is that the size of the budget aid is a function of the donor country’s fiscal situation, even after controlling for the government’s political orientation, the cyclical position of the donor economy, and its income per capita level. In light of these results, we argue that advocates of foreign aid should strongly lobby in favour of fiscal discipline. The alternative strategy of pushing for a more lenient budgetary treatment of foreign aid may be loaded with risks, and even turn to be counterproductive, particularly if the list of “virtuous” exceptions becomes exceedingly long. This is exactly what seems to have happened with the revision of the Stability and Growth pact.

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Paper provided by C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers in its series CEPR Discussion Papers with number 5721.

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Date of creation: Jun 2006
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Handle: RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:5721

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Related research
Keywords: fiscal policy; foreign aid;

Find related papers by JEL classification:
E62 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Macroeconomic Policy, Macroeconomic Aspects of Public Finance, and General Outlook - - - Fiscal Policy
F35 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Foreign Aid

This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

References listed on IDEAS
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  1. David Roodman, 2004. "An Index of Donor Performance," Working Papers 42, Center for Global Development. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  2. Craig Burnside & David Dollar, 2000. "Aid, Policies, and Growth," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 90(4), pages 847-868, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  3. Raghuram Rajan & Arvind Subramanian, 2005. "What Undermines Aid's Impact on Growth?," IMF Working Papers 05/126, International Monetary Fund. [Downloadable!]
    Other versions:
  4. Papanek, Gustav F, 1972. "The Effect of Aid and other Resource Transfers on Savings and Growth in Less Developed Countries," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 82(327), pages 934-50, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  5. Collier, Paul & Hoeffler, Anke & Soderbom, Mans, 2001. "On the duration of civil war," Policy Research Working Paper Series 2681, The World Bank. [Downloadable!]
  6. Raghuram Rajan & Arvind Subramanian, 2005. "Aid and Growth: What Does the Cross-Country Evidence Really Show?," IMF Working Papers 05/127, International Monetary Fund. [Downloadable!]
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  7. Collier, Paul & Dollar, David, 2002. "Aid allocation and poverty reduction," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 46(8), pages 1475-1500, September. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  8. Carl-Johan Dalgaard & Henrik Hansen & Finn Tarp, 2004. "On The Empirics of Foreign Aid and Growth," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 114(496), pages F191-F216, 06. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  9. Alesina, Alberto & Dollar, David, 2000. " Who Gives Foreign Aid to Whom and Why?," Journal of Economic Growth, Springer, vol. 5(1), pages 33-63, March. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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  10. Burnside, Craig & Dollar, David, 2004. "Aid, policies, and growth : revisiting the evidence," Policy Research Working Paper Series 3251, The World Bank. [Downloadable!]
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