Aid and Growth: Have We Come Full Circle?

The debate between development aid and economic growth has been tilting in recent years, resulting in questions on aid effectiveness and a backlash against official development assistance policies, despite growing evidence of benefits at the micro level. New research by Channing Arndt, Sam Jones and Finn Tarp of the Development Economics Research Group at the University of Copenhagen, and in conjunction with UNU-WIDER, explore whether this debate has come full circle. Their latest contribution to the aid-growth debate seeks to answer the question,“does foreign aid boost economic growth on average in developing countries?” On January 25^th, the Africa Growth Initative hosted an event at Brookings featuring presentations by the authors of the paper, as well as comments from David Roodman of the Center for Global Development and Homi Kharas of the Brookings Institution.

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