Suchergebnisse

The total funding envelope for World Bank projects is often divided among various state and non-state actors, each of which can have competing ideas about or interests in the project. How does the division of financing relate to overall project effectiveness? I argue that too many funding streams in a project can reduce project effectiveness by creating delays, increasing transaction costs, and blurring lines of accountability. I combine original data on the number and concentration of financial collaborators in World Bank projects with the World Bank's ratings of project performance, looking at within-country variation across projects to explore whether or not there is evidence of reduced aid effectiveness in projects with more participants. The results suggest that projects with significant cofinancing receive somewhat worse project ratings.

If development projects are to be effective, a minimum requirement is that the funding reaches its intended destination. Yet the history of international development is replete with examples of this not happening. I argue that there will be fewer problems with corruption or other diversions of funding-which I jointly label capture-in more precisely targeted projects. More well-defined targeting results in superior accountability relationships because there is greater clarity of responsibility, clearer information about outcomes, and improved identifiability of stakeholders. I use an original cross-country, cross-project data set on the incidence of capture in World Bank-funded investment projects to test the theory. The data show a negative relationship between targeting and capture, and I demonstrate that this relationship is robust to a variety of specifications. In addition, I find that there is a higher baseline likelihood of project capture in countries perceived as more corrupt according to commonly used survey-based measures from Transparency International and the Worldwide Governance Indicators, cross-validating those measures and my own. Adapted from the source document.

Winters introduces a special section on foreign aid. Despite the long history of aid flows and research on them, some of the fundamental questions of foreign aid remain resolved. The three essays that follow review recent advances and suggest ways forward for the foreign aid literature. The essays challenge conventional wisdom in some ways, demonstrate the usefulness of new data that has been made available with the research release of the AidData dataset. Adapted from the source document.