This thesis examines a number of specific efforts by the United Nations to offer and administer development aid to newly independent and ‘underdeveloped’ countries from the Global South during the decades following World War Two. Broadly, this thesis casts light on the competitive nature of postwar international development. In doing so, it examines development as a contest, whereby, the United Nations sought to stake out a claim to its share of the global development process during the 1950s and early 1960s. Crucially, this thesis sets this struggle against the backdrop of the increasing demand for development aid that accompanied the advent of mass decolonization in Africa by 1960. Consequently, this gave rise to a heightened competition over what type of aid best suited newly independent countries and who should administer it. Here, this study demonstrates how the UN contended with both bilateral and multilateral aid options outside the Organization, as well as, the challenges associated with providing development aid to countries that requested noncolonial assistance yet jealously guarded their newly acquired sovereignty. Finally, it was through the UN’s belief in its development directive, its unique ‘brand’ of aid and the value of its operational pursuits that it added a crucial dimension to the development discourse of the period. At the UN, this resulted in the expansion of the UN’s development reach and development becoming a primary, if not the chief focus of the Organization during the First UN Development Decade of the 1960s. At the same time, it was during the postwar decades that the Organization helped to give development a global quality through a concerted effort towards the internationalization of development aid. Altogether, this thesis extends the boundaries of the study of postwar development by demonstrating how the UN functioned as an important autonomous institution and actor as it promoted economic and social development through multilateral development aid. Furthermore, this study challenges traditional interpretations of the UN that depict the Organization as solely a foreign policy tool of its member states or as an Organization predominantly concerned with peace and security issues during this era.

The main motivation of this thesis is to contribute to the literature on the macroeconomic effects of foreign aid flows. It consists of four empirical papers, investigating the two main channels through which aid flows impact the recipient economy: (i) the fiscal sector, and (ii) the real exchange rate. The first paper is concerned with the impact of aid on government expenditure, domestic revenues and borrowing. It uses a traditional fiscal response framework with annual data for Ethiopia. The second paper also focuses on the fiscal sector but uses a recently compiled quarterly fiscal dataset and the cointegrated vector autoregression methodology. The main result arising from both papers is the strong correlation between aid inflows and domestic borrowing, possibly as a strategy to smooth unpredictable and volatile aid inflows. Aid is positively correlated with government expenditures, but there is little evidence of tax displacement. There is also evidence of aid heterogeneity, as grants and loans induce different effects. The third paper assesses the impact of foreign aid on the Ethiopian real exchange rate, which is a common measure of external competitiveness. It uses a quarterly macroeconomic dataset and applies two distinct methodologies: (i) single-equation cointegration models, and (ii) an unobserved components model. The results do not provide support for the ‘Dutch disease' hypothesis. The fourth paper investigates the extent to which foreign aid is ‘absorbed' and ‘spent'. The empirical analysis uses a panel of 25 African low-income countries and applies recently developed panel cointegration techniques. The findings suggest that aid is fully spent while absorption is higher than previously estimated.