Download or read book Aid Project Proliferation and Absorptive Capacity written by David Roodman and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when the international dialogue surrounding development is focused on increasing the quantity of aid, this paper focuses on how the donor community can improve the quality of foreign assistance. The author discusses the problem of project proliferation, and the tendency of developing countries who receive aid to become overburdened by the costs of administering aid projects. Using a sophisticated mathematical modeling process, the author analyzes the relationship between total aid and recipient activity, and the distribution of projects by size. The conclusions hold insights for policy-makers: when projects proliferate beyond a certain point, the effective marginal utility of aid declines sharply, and can even become negative. This negative effect of aid on development can be especially true if the aid delivery process drifts away from the goal of poverty reduction. In practice, therefore, the author suggests that when countries reach their absorptive capacity, aid dollars given beyond that point lose much of their effectiveness. This paper is part of the Center for Global Development's ongoing work on aid effectiveness. To learn more about the potential negative effect of aid on development, and specifically institution-building, read Working Paper 71, "Fiscal Implications of Large Aid Increases."
Download or read book When Instability Increases the Effectiveness of Aid Projects written by Patrick Guillaumont and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2006 with total page 36 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authors assess the effect of economic instability on the success of projects funded by the World Bank using the outcome of the projects, which is a notation of their overall success determined by the Bank's Independent Evaluation Group. It has been argued in macroeconomic studies that aid effectiveness is higher in vulnerable countries because it dampens the negative effects of shocks. The authors show that this finding is not inconsistent with the observation that the success of the projects is lower in an unstable environment. Instability, in particular the instability of exports, harms aid projects as it harms the rest of the economy, while the success of projects decreases when the total amount of aid received increases, due to absorptive capacity limitations. But this decrease is slower when instability is higher, showing a positive effect of aid through its stabilizing impact. The authors find the same results keeping only the projects funded by nonconcessionary loans, which suggests that the cushioning effect of aid extends not only to aid funded projects but to whole sets of projects. Corroborating macroeconomic findings, their results lead to the same conclusion that more aid should be allocated to more vulnerable countries, in spite of the lower success of the projects in an unstable environment: project evaluations cannot include the macrostabilizing effect of the aid delivered through projects.
Download or read book Rethinking Absorptive Capacity written by Robert D. Lamb and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013-07-01 with total page 69 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When recipients cannot absorb the aid and attention they are offered, the common response is “capacity building”—as if the source of the problem is the recipient’s implementation capacity. In this report, Robert D. Lamb and Kathryn Mixon present the results of their research on the sources of absorptive capacity. They find that this sort of “blaming the victim” mentality, while common, is not always justified. While it is true that many aid recipients do not have adequate capacity for implementation, it is equally true that many aid programs are designed and implemented without an adequate appreciation of local desires, resources, capabilities, and challenges. Absorptive capacity, in other words, is a byproduct of the donor-recipient relationship. The authors present a new framework for measuring absorptive capacity. This framework is intended to supplement existing planning, monitoring, and evaluation processes, offering a new way to test whether an existing approach is compatible with local conditions and a method for improving the fit.
Download or read book Development Aid written by George Mavrotas and published by Springer. This book was released on 2009-01-15 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book addresses several gaps in knowledge of aid allocation and effectiveness and provides new analytical insights. Topics covered include the interface between aid allocation and perceptions of aid effectiveness, the year-on-year volatility of aid and evaluation of the country-level impacts of aid.
Download or read book The Trouble with Aid written by Jonathan Glennie and published by Zed Books Ltd.. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Africa is poor. If we send it money it will be less poor. It seems perfectly logical, doesn't it? Millions of people in the rich world, moved by images on television and appalled by the miserable conditions endured by so many in other countries, have joined campaigns to persuade their governments to double aid to Africa and help put an end to such shameful inequality. It seems simple. But it isn't. In this book, Jonathan Glennie argues that, along with its many benefits, government aid to Africa has often meant more poverty, more hungry people, worse basic services and damage to already precarious democratic institutions. Moreover, calls for more aid are drowning out pressure for action that would really make a difference for Africa’s poor. Rather than doubling aid to Africa, it is time to reduce aid dependency. Through an honest assessment of both the positive and negative consequences of aid, this book will show you why.
Download or read book Assessing Aid written by and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 1998 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Assessing Aid determines that the effectiveness of aid is not decided by the amount received but rather the institutional and policy environment into which it is accepted. It examines how development assistance can be more effective at reducing global poverty and gives five mainrecommendations for making aid more effective: targeting financial aid to poor countries with good policies and strong economic management; providing policy-based aid to demonstrated reformers; using simpler instruments to transfer resources to countries with sound management; focusing projects oncreating and transmitting knowledge and capacity; and rethinking the internal incentives of aid agencies.
Download or read book Absorptive Capacity for Foreign Aid written by Romeo A. Reyes and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book What is Effective Aid written by Charles Kenny and published by World Bank Publications. This book was released on 2012 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: There are significant weaknesses in some of the traditional justifications for assuming that aid will foster development. This paper looks at what the cross-country aid effectiveness literature and World Bank Operations Evaluation Department reviews have suggested about effective aid, first in terms of promoting income growth, and then for promoting other goals. This review forms the basis for a discussion of recommendations to improve aid effectiveness and a discussion of effective aid allocation. Given the multiple potential objectives for aid, there is no one right answer. However, it appears that there are a number of reforms to aid practices and distribution that might help to deliver a more significant return to aid resources. We should provide aid where institutions are already strong, where they can be strengthened with the help of donor resources, or where they can be bypassed with limited damage to existing institutional capacity. The importance of institutions to aid outcomes, as well as the fungibility of aid flows, suggests that programmatic aid should be expanded in countries with strong institutions, while project aid should be supported based on its ability to transfer knowledge and test new practices and support global public good provision rather than (merely) as a tool of financial resource transfer. The importance of institutions also suggests that we should be cautious in our expectations regarding the results of increased aid flows.
Download or read book Aid for Trade Global and Regional Perspectives written by Philippe Lombaerde and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2009-02-03 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aid for Trade (AfT) has become a major item on the international trade and development discourse. This is to a large extent in response to concerns expressed by developing countries and economies in transition with regard to their capacities to implement trade agreements, especially WTO agreements, and undertake necessary adjustments to increase net development gains from emerging trade opportunities. In this World Report, major UN agencies active in development cooperation and longstanding providers of trade-related technical assistance and capacity building discuss ways to sustain the momentum towards the operationalization and implementation of the AfT initiative and the supportive role to be played by the UN system. This is consistent with UN's role in promoting development and helping to achieve poverty reduction, as committed in the Millennium Declaration and the 2005 World Summit Outcome. The Report should be of particular interest to government officials, officials of regional organizations, representatives of the private sector dealing with trade agreements and negotiations, civil society and academia. Supachai Panitchpakdi, Secretary-General of UNCTAD Lakshmi Puri is Acting Deputy Secretary-General and Director of the Division on International Trade and Services, and Commodities at UNCTAD in Geneva. Philippe De Lombaerde is Associate Director of United Nations University (UNU-CRIS) in Bruges. In collaboration with: UNCTAD, ECA, ECLAC, ESCAP, ESCWA, UNECE, UNIDO, UNDP, UNEP
Download or read book Foreign Aid for Development written by George Mavrotas and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2010-02-25 with total page 394 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foreign aid is one of the few topics in the development discourse with such an uninterrupted, yet volatile history in terms of interest and attention from academics, policymakers, and practitioners alike. Does aid work in promoting growth and reducing poverty in the developing world? Will a new 'big push' approach accelerate progress towards the Millennium Development Goals or will another opportunity be missed? Can the lessons of almost half a century of aid giving be learnt? These are truly important questions in view of the emerging new landscape in foreign aid and recent developments related to the global financial crisis, which are expected to have far reaching implications for both donors and recipients engaged in this area. Against this shifting aid landscape, there is a pressing need to evaluate progress to date and shed new light on emerging issues and agendas. This volume brings together leading aid experts to review the progress achieved so far, identify the challenges ahead, and discuss the emerging policy agenda in foreign aid. A central conclusion of this important and timely volume is that, since development aid remains crucial for many developing countries, a huge effort is needed from both donors and aid recipients to overcome the inefficiencies and make aid work better for poor people. After all, as global citizens, we have a moral obligation to do the best we can to lift people out of poverty in the developing world. The findings of this book will be of considerable interest to professionals and policymakers engaged in policy reforms in foreign aid, and provide an essential one-stop reference for students of development, international finance, and economics.
Download or read book Greening Aid written by Robert L. Hicks and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2010-02-04 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For more than three decades, the impact of aid on the global environment has been the subject of vigorous protest and debate. With billions spent on environmental aid each year, this groundbreaking text seeks to understand why aid is given, how effective it is, and whether aid is actually going to the places with the greatest environmental need.
Download or read book Development Policy written by Joachim Betz and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-10-28 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Developing countries have made rapid but highly varied progress since the 1990s. So much so that the boundaries to the traditional industrialized countries have become partially blurred. On the other hand, there are a number of mostly fragile states that have not succeeded in doing so, or have only rudimentarily succeeded. Talk of one "Third World" and common development problems thus explains little. Instead, development has become a requirement for all states, which this textbook breaks down and assesses according to key development goals. This book is a translation of the original German 1st edition Entwicklungspolitik by Joachim Betz, published by Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature in 2021. The translation was done with the help of artificial intelligence (machine translation by the service DeepL.com). A subsequent human revision was done primarily in terms of content, so that the book will read stylistically differently from a conventional translation. Springer Nature works continuously to further the development of tools for the production of books and on the related technologies to support the authors.
Download or read book Reinventing Foreign Aid written by William R. Easterly and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2008-05-09 with total page 581 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Top experts in the field discuss how to improve the effectiveness of foreign aid, proposing practical solutions to specific problems rather than a utopian master plan. The urgency of reducing poverty in the developing world has been the subject of a public campaign by such unlikely policy experts as George Clooney, Alicia Keyes, Elton John, Angelina Jolie, and Bono. And yet accompanying the call for more foreign aid is an almost universal discontent with the effectiveness of the existing aid system. In Reinventing Foreign Aid, development expert William Easterly has gathered top scholars in the field to discuss how to improve foreign aid. These authors, Easterly points out, are not claiming that their ideas will (to invoke a current slogan) Make Poverty History. Rather, they take on specific problems and propose some hard-headed solutions. Easterly himself, in an expansive and impassioned introductory chapter, makes a case for the “searchers”—who explore solutions by trial and error and learn from feedback—over the “planners”—who throw an endless supply of resources at a big goal—as the most likely to reduce poverty. Other writers look at scientific evaluation of aid projects (including randomized trials) and describe projects found to be cost-effective, including vaccine delivery and HIV education; consider how to deal with the government of the recipient state (work through it or bypass a possibly dysfunctional government?); examine the roles of the International Monetary Fund (a de-facto aid provider) and the World Bank; and analyze some new and innovative proposals for distributing aid. Contributors Abhijit Banerjee, Nancy Birdsall, Craig Burnside, Esther Duflo, Domenico Fanizza, William Easterly, Ruimin He, Kurt Hoffman, Stephen Knack, Michael Kremer, Mari Kuraishi, Ruth Levine, Bertin Martens, John McMillan, Edward Miguel, Jonathan Morduch, Todd Moss, Gunilla Pettersson, Lant Pritchett, Steven Radelet, Aminur Rahman, Ritva Reinikka, Jakob Svensson, Nicolas van de Walle, James Vreeland, Dennis Whittle, Michael Woolcock
Download or read book Development Cooperation in Times of Crisis written by José Antonio Alonso and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2012-07-17 with total page 385 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leading governments undertook extraordinary measures to offset the 2008 economic crisis, shoring up financial institutions, stimulating demand to reverse recession, and rebalancing budgets to alleviate sovereign debt. While productive in and of themselves, these solutions were effective because they were coordinated internationally and were matched with sweeping global financial reforms. Unfortunately, coordination has weakened after these initial steps, indicating one of the crisis's adverse effects will be a significant reduction in development cooperation. Urging advanced nations to improve their support for development, the contributors to this volume revisit the causes of the 2008 collapse and the ongoing effects of recession on global and developing economies. They reevaluate the international response to crisis and suggest more effective approaches to development cooperation. Experts on international aid join together to redesign the cooperation system and its governance, so it can accept new actors and better achieve the Millennial Development Goals of 2015 within the context of severe global crisis. In their introduction, José Antonio Alonso and José Antonio Ocampo summarize different chapters and the implications of their analyses, concluding with a frank assessment of global economic imbalance and the ability of increased cooperation to rectify these inequalities.
Download or read book Global Dynamics written by Alan G. Wilson and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2016-05-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A world model: economies, trade, migration, security and development aid. This bookprovides the analytical capability to understand and explore the dynamics of globalisation. It is anchored in economic input-output models of over 200 countries and their relationships through trade, migration, security and development aid. The tools of complexity science are brought to bear and mathematical and computer models are developed both for the elements and for an integrated whole. Models are developed at a variety of scales ranging from the global and international trade through a European model of inter-sub-regional migration to piracy in the Gulf and the London riots of 2011. The models embrace the changing technology of international shipping, the impacts of migration on economic development along with changing patterns of military expenditure and development aid. A unique contribution is the level of spatial disaggregation which presents each of 200+ countries and their mutual interdependencies – along with some finer scale analyses of cities and regions. This is the first global model which offers this depth of detail with fully work-out models, these provide tools for policy making at national, European and global scales. Global dynamics: Presents in depth models of global dynamics. Provides a world economic model of 200+ countries and their interactions through trade, migration, security and development aid. Provides pointers to the deployment of analytical capability through modelling in policy development. Features a variety of models that constitute a formidable toolkit for analysis and policy development. Offers a demonstration of the practicalities of complexity science concepts. This book is for practitioners and policy analysts as well as those interested in mathematical model building and complexity science as well as advanced undergraduate and postgraduate level students.
Download or read book Does Foreign Aid Really Work written by Roger C. Riddell and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2008-08-07 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Foreign aid is now a $100bn business and is expanding more rapidly today than it has for a generation. But does it work? Indeed, is it needed at all? Other attempts to answer these important questions have been dominated by a focus on the impact of official aid provided by governments. But today possibly as much as 30 percent of aid is provided by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), and over 10 percent is provided as emergency assistance. In this first-ever attempt to provide an overall assessment of aid, Roger Riddell presents a rigorous but highly readable account of aid, warts and all. Does Foreign Aid Really Work? sets out the evidence and exposes the instances where aid has failed and explains why. The book also examines the way that politics distorts aid, and disentangles the moral and ethical assumptions that lie behind the belief that aid does good. The book concludes by detailing the practical ways that aid needs to change if it is to be the effective force for good that its providers claim it is.
Download or read book Managing Projects in Africa written by Project Management Journal and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-01-30 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This special issue of the Project Management Journal presents a collection of six articles on managing projects in Africa. Providing a window into the important project activity taking place there, these articles extend both the empirical and theoretical understanding of the African project context and contribute to improving practice. Each article makes a unique contribution to either our understanding of the African project context or project management in general, and sometimes to both. After an introduction to the African project context at the start of the 21st century, the articles explore: three different countries as well as multinational projects; for-profit, public sector, and development aid projects; infrastructure and information and communication technology; project governance as well as project management; and partnering challenges.
