We test how donors respond to new information about a charity’s effectiveness. Freedom from Hunger implemented a test of its direct marketing solicitations, varying letters by whether they include a discussion of their program’s impact as measured by scientific research. The base script, used for both treatment and control, included a standard qualitative story about an individual beneficiary. ...

The international community holds high expectations for aid producing demonstrable results in the health sector, at the global and developing country levels. Yet, measuring the effectiveness of aid presents methodological challenges. Existing evaluation frameworks are not sufficiently geared toward learning whether and how practices have changed. We present a framework for measuring the results...

To analyze ways in which aid can be made more effective, we develop a growth model in which aid finances infrastructure investment and pro-poor spending. We assume that the recipient countries are aid-dependent in the early phase of development and ultimately become independent. In the model, donors can accelerate the independence of a recipient from aid by investing in infrastructure. We demon...

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The empirical literature on aid effectiveness has yielded unclear and ambiguous results. This is not surprising given the heterogeneity of aid motives, the limitations of the tools of analysis, and the complex causality chain linking external aid to final outcomes. The causality chain has been largely ignored and as a consequence the relationship between aid and development has been mostly hand...

This paper discusses and seeks to quantify the effects of improved donor coordination on aid effectiveness. Empirical estimates are first provided of the reductions in transaction costs that can be achieved by better donor coordination via concentration to fewer partner countries and a shift from project aid to programme-based approaches. Further estimates are presented showing how much could b...