Journal ArticleDOI
The Curse of Aid
TLDR
This paper found that if the foreign aid over Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that a country receives over a period of five years reaches the 75th percentile in the sample, then a 10-point index of democracy is reduced between 0.5 and almost one point, a large effect.Abstract:
Foreign aid provides a windfall of resources to recipient countries and may result in the same rent seeking behavior as documented in the 'curse of natural resources' literature. In this paper the author discusses this effect and documents its magnitude. Using panel data for 108 recipient countries in the period 1960 to 1999, the author found that foreign aid has a negative impact on institutions. In particular, if the foreign aid over Gross Domestic Product (GDP) that a country receives over a period of five years reaches the 75th percentile in the sample, then a 10-point index of democracy is reduced between 0.5 and almost one point, a large effect. For comparison, we also measure the effect of oil rents on political institutions. The author found that aid is a bigger curse than oil.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Income and Democracy
TL;DR: This paper showed that controlling for such factors by including country fixed effects removes the statistical association between income per capita and vari- ous measures of democracy, and presented instrumental-variables estimates that also show no causal effect of income on democracy.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Resource Curse Revisited and Revised: A Tale of Paradoxes and Red Herrings
TL;DR: The authors evaluate the empirical basis for the so-called resource curse and find that, despite the topic's popularity in economics and political science research, this apparent paradox may be a red herring.
Journal ArticleDOI
Aid, Policies, and Growth: Comment
TL;DR: Easterly et al. as mentioned in this paper examined whether aid has a positive impact on growth in developing countries with good fiscal, monetary, and trade policies but has little effect in the presence of poor policies.
Journal ArticleDOI
Income and Democracy
Daron Acemoglu,Daron Acemoglu,Daron Acemoglu,Simon Johnson,Simon Johnson,James A. Robinson,James A. Robinson,James A. Robinson,Pierre Yared +8 more
TL;DR: The authors showed that the long-run evolution of income and democracy is related to historical factors, and that the positive correlation between income and political development in a sample of former European colonies disappears when they control for the historical determinants.
Posted Content
Ruggedness: The blessing of bad geography in Africa
Nathan Nunn,Diego Puga +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors estimate the importance of terrain ruggedness and its interaction with historical events on economic outcomes and find that both effects are significant statistically and that for Africa the indirect positive effect is at least as large as the direct negative effect.
References
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Report SeriesDOI
Initial conditions and moment restrictions in dynamic panel data models
Richard Blundell,Stephen Bond +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, two alternative linear estimators that are designed to improve the properties of the standard first-differenced GMM estimator are presented. But both estimators require restrictions on the initial conditions process.
ReportDOI
Economic Growth in a Cross Section of Countries
TL;DR: For 98 countries in the period 1960-1985, the growth rate of real per capita GDP is positively related to initial human capital (proxied by 1960 school-enrollment rates) and negatively related to the initial (1960) level as mentioned in this paper.
Journal ArticleDOI
Why Do Some Countries Produce so Much More Output Per Worker than Others
TL;DR: This paper showed that differences in physical capital and educational attainment can only partially explain the variation in output per worker, and that a large amount of variation in the level of the Solow residual across countries is driven by differences in institutions and government policies.
Journal ArticleDOI
Corruption and Growth
TL;DR: In this paper, a newly assembled data set consisting of subjective indices of corruption, the amount of red tape, the efficiency of the judicial system, and various categories of political stability for a cross section of countries is analyzed.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Colonial Origins of Comparative Development: An Empirical Investigation
TL;DR: Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson as discussed by the authors used estimates of potential European settler mortality as an instrument for institutional variation in former European colonies today, and they followed the lead of Curtin who compiled data on the death rates faced by European soldiers in various overseas postings.