This thesis identifies the gaps in the literature on foreign aid, and tries to fill some of them focusing particularly on Niger, a country that has received aid since its independence in 1960, yet remains one of the world's poorest. The work contributes to the literature in three ways: First, it addresses moral hazard: the relationship between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the country is analysed through a historical case study. Niger's requests for assistance are accompanied by promises to undertake reforms; however, once aid is disbursed, these undertakings rarely materialize. Despite this record of poor (and deteriorating) compliance, IMF aid continues to flow, engendering perverse incentives and moral hazard. Secondly, it analyses whether aid is associated with poverty reduction. Aid is correlated with poverty, which is to be expected due to its pro-poor targeting nature. However, this study found increases in poverty associated with communities which were recipients of aid. To shed more light on this, households receiving aid were compared with those receiving no project assistance at all, and with households who benefited from non-aid based development projects. The results showed that changes in poverty levels among aid recipient households were not statistically different to those among households receiving no assistance. However, households benefiting from aid under-performed those who benefited from other projects. Thirdly, it explores whether aid brings utility to households through the provision of public goods. The results suggest that aid projects do help households. However, other sources of development projects are more efficient at doing so. Information is the key: it is a vital prerequisite for projects to address the needs of the population, and not all donors have the same information. Information can be obtained through co-funding projects with other donors, although there are also coordination costs. The models estimated allow the prediction of the benefits a project could provide to a household. Such predictive abilities could allow policymakers to coordinate donors' initiatives to maximize their effectiveness. However, at present Niger lacks the capacity to achieve such coordination. Furthermore, such an approach would involve having to reduce the least efficient donors to mere providers of finance (i.e. channel their resources through other donor types), a role they might not be willing to accept.

As democracy promotion has become an increasingly important aspect on the agenda of foreign aid donors, and since such prioritization of funding comes at the expense of other development areas, it is arguably of interest for donors as well as researchers to investigate its actual impact on democratization. This study endeavors to examine the influence of two types of foreign assistance that could potentially contribute to a democratic development, directlythrough democracy support and indirectly through aid focused on education. Four models of regression analysis are applied on a data set of 65 developing countries receiving Official Development Assistance (ODA), during the period of 2006–2018. The findings of this study are inconclusive in determining the influence of these aid types, as the main results show no significant effects on the Freedom House grading of the recipient countries. Yet, when using an alternative measurement, the Democracy Index, directly focused democracy support appears to have a slight positive and significant impact on democratization. These results should however be interpreted with caution due to the risk of reversed causality.

The first essay revisits the highly debated aid-policy-growth association with updated data. The results overturn Burnside and Dollar’s original findings by simply using new data over the same countries and years. Additional tests indicate that the original results are mainly sample driven. Marginal effects from the extended sample (1962-2013) provide some evidence that aid can promote growth in the presence of good policies. Post-Cold War (1990-2013) analysis, however, reveals that aid may decrease growth at any level of policy. The overwhelming majority of the results suggest aid conditional on policy is ineffective. This essay illustrates why the debate continues by showing that the results are highly sensitive to country-year selection, choice of methodology, instrumental variable selection, measurement of institutional quality, and growth rate measurement. Depending on a number of factors, both sides of the debate can be right. The second essay investigates the question “does foreign aid promote entrepreneurship?” This question has not been investigated in the existing literature. With a panel of 38 countries during 2005 to 2014, this research connects aid and recipient countries’ entrepreneurial activities. Aggregate aid tends to only boost necessity driven early-stage entrepreneurship and benefit low-income entrepreneurs. Aid to infrastructure promotes entrepreneurship driven by both opportunity and necessity motivations. It also incentivizes more entrepreneurs to compete with homogeneous products. Evidence also suggests that both aggregate aid and infrastructural aid discourages adoption of state of the art technologies, raises business failure rate, and is associated more with necessity-driven early-stage entrepreneurial activities for females. The third research examines the cross-country effectiveness of Aid for Trade (AfT) policy during 2004 to 2013. AfT targets trade liberalization through reducing trade costs and facilitating exports in recipient countries. This development policy has attracted much attention despite the doubts of effectiveness of foreign aid in general. Overall, this paper does not find evidence supporting AfT reducing trade costs or enlarging exports or imports. However, aid to economic infrastructure is positively related to service exports; it also connects aid recipient countries more closely with high-income donor countries via importing more merchandise from each other. At the same time, recipient countries import less from other low and middle income neighboring countries. In terms of sectoral AfT, aid to industry sector decreases manufactured imports, either due to substitution toward domestic manufactured products or because of higher tariffs of manufactured products.

The literature has shown that aggregate aid is mostly ineffective (Doucouliagos and Paldam, 2011). However, new studies on foreign aid also show that the effect of aid depends on both aid type and the donor type (Clemens et al., 2012; Isaksson and Kotsadam, 2018). Thus, the first essay investigates the impact of education aid on educational outcomes. The study uses panel data for 83 developing countries from 2000-2014 to examine World Bank education aid. The results suggest that there is no robust evidence that education aid is effective in improving educational outcomes. The paper finds some evidence that aid improves enrollment rates in primary and secondary but not tertiary education. The results show that aid's effectiveness is determined, to a large extent, by the type of aid and the economic outcomes aid targeted. Likewise, the second essay examines whether specific types of aid are more effective across different donors. The study uses factor analysis to separate aid flows into interpretable categories, economic purposes, social purposes, and infrastructure. In addition, the study compares three donors, the World Bank, the U.S., and China. Examining the growth effect of each aid type for each donor shows that the impacts depend on aid type. All the aid types are positive irrespective of the donor, though only the U.S. aid types show some improvements economic growth. The Chinese economic aid is a complement of the World Bank economic aid. However, the Chinese social aid and the World Bank social aid are both substitutes. Both studies show that most foreign aid to developing countries is not effective, but disaggregating aid by type can lead to moderate improvements in developing countries.

No description available.

Country risk is an important concern in international business. Country risk classification refers to determining the risk level at which a country will not repay its international debt. Traditionally, country risk classification resorts to statistics methods such as discriminant analysis. In the past two decades, the so-called multicriteria decision aid (MCDA) methods have been proved to enjoy better performance than the standard statistics methods. Nevertheless, the performance of the MCDA methods is still far away from satisfactory and can be improved significantly. The better performance of several MCDA methods, such as UTADIS (UTilités Additives DIScriminantes) and MHDIS (Multigroup Hierarchical Discrimination), is achieved by exploiting the rater’s background knowledge. In the standard MCDA model, we assume that the criterion function for every factor is monotone and all the factors are independent. Then, we approximate the impact of every factor and use the sum of the corresponding criterion functions to determine the risk level of a country. By discretizing the feasible domain of the factor, the MCDA method solves a linear program to find a classifier for country risk classification. This thesis tries to enhance the capability of MCDA methods by allowing a class of non-monotone criteria: the unimodal ones. For this purpose, we developed an integer quadratic (non-convex) program for general unimodal criteria. Further, if we restrict ourselves to convex or concave unimodal criteria, then we can still use a linear program to find a classifier. For the case where all the factors are correlated, a simple quadratic form of aggregation is proposed to deal with it. Compared with the original UTADIS model, our generalized model is more flexible and can deal with more complex scenarios. Finally, our generalized model is tested based on cross-validation and our experiment is carried out under the AMPL+sovers environment. Promising numeric results indicate that except for its theoretical advantages, our generalized model exhibits practical efficiency and robustness as well. / Thesis / Master of Science (MS)

No / Adopting a distinctive structural political economy approach, this book uniquely explains the blind spots of alternative political economy approaches to international aid, and presents an original framework for evaluating likely reformers' strength of commitment and potential alliances with donors. / Australian Development Research Awards, AusAID

No description available.

The purpose of this study was to examine the financial nexus between college choice and persistence for full-time, first-time, first-year freshman college students. The theoretical framework of this study was the financial nexus construct developed by St. John, Paulsen, and Starkey (1996) and Paulsen and St. John (1997). This is the first study to apply the financial nexus construct to full-time, first-time, first-year freshman population; the first to examine baccalaureate/comprehensive and doctoral/research institutions in both public and private sectors separately. The results of this study found that (1) overall, it is slightly evident that there is a financial nexus between college choice and persistence among full-time, first-time, first-year freshman students; (2) the nexus between college choice and persistence may be different by the Carnegie Classification, and (3) the pattern of the direct effects of financial variables (i.e., tuition and financial aid) on persistence was different from the previous results. Unlike in the previous studies, tuition increases appeared to have a positive effect on the enrollment of full-time, first-time, first-year freshman students attending institutions of all Carnegie Classifications. The result suggests that price may reveal a "quality effect" and that higher tuition institution may signal higher quality. In both public and private institution students, students of comprehensive/baccalaureate institutions were more sensitive to tuition than those of research/doctoral institution. This result may raise fundamental questions about the tuition price responsiveness of full-time, first-time, first-year freshman students. The results indicate that public students were more sensitive to grants than private students. Also, students attending comprehensive/ baccalaureate institutions were more sensitive to grants than those of research/doctoral institutions in both sectors.

The study determined the overall persistence rate of first-time full-time entrants into a mid-sized private university during the fall semesters 1989 to 1991 to the 2nd year (1990 to 1992). The study compared the retention rate of recipients and nonrecipients of a variety of financial aid programs. Included is a comparison of groups receiving various types of financial assistance and whether or not there are differences between the groups with respect to types of assistance, gender, ethnicity (African American, Hispanic, Anglo), high school grade point average, and national test scores (SAT, ACT). The types of assistance studied were categorized by academic scholarships, university-operated student employment, need-based grants, activity awards, entitlements, and loans. The question of whether renewal, elimination, or reduction in assistance relates to retention was also studied.