Premium
Foreign Aid and Recurrent Cost: Donor Competition, Aid Proliferation, and Budget Support
Author(s) -
Arimoto Yutaka,
Kono Hisaki
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
review of development economics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.531
H-Index - 50
eISSN - 1467-9361
pISSN - 1363-6669
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9361.2008.00486.x
Subject(s) - aid effectiveness , economic shortage , economics , competition (biology) , investment (military) , development aid , public economics , economic growth , developing country , ecology , linguistics , philosophy , government (linguistics) , politics , political science , law , biology
Recent empirical studies reveal that effectiveness of aid on growth is ambiguous. The authors consider aid proliferation—excess aid investment relative to recurrent cost—as a potential cause that undermines aid effectiveness, because aid projects can only produce sustainable benefits when sufficient recurrent costs are disbursed. They consider the donor's budget support as a device to supplement the shortage of the recipient's recurrent cost and to alleviate the misallocation of inputs. However, when donors have self‐interested preferences for the success of their own projects over those conducted by others, they provide insufficient budget support relative to aid, which results in aid proliferation. Moreover, aid proliferation is shown to be worsened by the presence of more donors.