Charitable giving is an important source of funding for overseas development and emergency relief. Donations in the UK are about a quarter of the size of government development aid. There has been strong growth over time, reflecting the activities of development charities and the public response to humanitarian emergencies. The paper examines how this charitable giving has changed since 1978, u...

We construct an endogenous growth model and we employ empirical analysis to investigate the link between foreign aid and production inefficiency in the presence of different political orientations in the recipient country. Using a panel of 124 countries from 1971 to 2007 and the production frontier toolbox, controlling for unobserved heterogeneity, time horizons, the sources of aid, and the tim...

This paper investigates the impact of the US and China’s foreign aids to Africa on trade flows between donor and recipient countries. Evidence from the gravity model estimates reveals that the two donors’ exports are strengthened by their aids to African partners. Interestingly, China’s aid shows a positive effect on its total volume of trade and imports from Africa, while the aid from the US e...

Charitable giving has increasingly become ‘tough love’ it has come to require recipients to undertake costly prior action. A common justification is that of greater efficiency: willingness to undertake costly actions signals greater productivity from transfers. However, there is a trade-off. Conditions impose a cost, since the activities required are by themselves welfare reducing for at least ...

This paper examines the impact of uncertain capital flows on growth to a group of 60 developing countries during the 1990s. We distinguish between total capital flows, official capital flows and private capital flows. For the three types of capital flows we derive a yearly uncertainty measure. We use the yearly uncertainty measures in ordinary least squares estimates, as well as system GMM esti...

This paper examines the dynamics of the linkages between Shanghai and Hong Kong stock indices. While the volatility linkage is analysed by a multivariate GARCH framework, the dependence of returns is examined by a copula approach. Eight different copula functions are applied in this study including two time varying ones which capture the time varying process of the linkage. The result shows sig...

To study whether foreign aid fuels personal, regional and ethnic favoritism, we use satellite data on nighttime light for any region in any aid-recipient country, and we determine for each year and each country the region in which the current political leader was born. Having a panel with 22,850 regions in 91 aid recipient countries with yearly observations from 1992 to 2005, we compare the eff...

This paper examines the macroeconomic effects of foreign aid transfers in a small open recipient economy. The focus, however, is not on the impact of foreign aid per se but rather on aid’s influence conditional upon the different budgetary financing policies under the discretion of the recipient government. We compare the effects of an aid transfer tied to investment in a public good from a pur...

This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF. The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate. With official development assistance (ODA) set to rise as cou...

Th e present paper focuses on the role of domestic resource mobilization for fi nancing poverty reduction strategies. Policy makers should be aware of important macroeconomic trade-off s associated with MDG strategies fi nanced from tax increases or domestic borrowing. Th e trade-off s are largely intertemporal: can poor and middle-income countries absorb the initial fi nancing costs in order t...