Sowing and reaping

"Much of the academic debate on the effectiveness of foreign aid is centered on the relationship between aid and growth. Different aid-growth studies find conflicting results: aid promotes growth everywhere; aid has a zero or negative impact on growth everywhere; or the effect of aid on growth depends on recipient-specific characteristics, such as the quality of institutions and policies. Although these studies fuel an interesting debate, cross-sectional macroeconomic studies cannot be the last word on the topic of aid effectiveness. In this paper, Dollar and Levin introduce microeconomic evidence on factors conducive to the success of aid-funded projects in developing countries. The authors use the success rate of World Bank-financed projects in the 1990s, as determined by the Operations Evaluation Department, as their dependent variable. Using instrumental variables estimation, the authors find that existence of high-quality institutions in a recipient country raises the probability that aid will be used effectively. There is also some evidence that geography matters, but location in Sub-Saharan Africa is a more robust indicator of lower project success rate than tropical climate