Aid intensity in Africa

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Abstract
The countries of Sub-Saharan Africa are disproportionately among those receiving the most foreign aid per capita in the world. In this paper we assess the intensity of aid flows to African countries, defined as the size of these flows relative to the categories of economic activity they are designed to support. In the process we provide a critical overview of standard measures of aid and place the flows currently being received by African countries in a cross-country and intertemporal perspective. We draw examples throughout from Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Mali, Mozambique, Uganda and Zambia—seven countries whose aid experience spans that of Sub-Saharan Africa and will subsequently be the subject of intensive study.1 Measured relative to recipient GNP, the median value of aid to African countries now stands at nearly 10 times the amount received by Western Europe under the Marshall Plan. While a presumption in favor of fundamental effects on welfare and institutions seems uncontestible, the term “aid intensity” is deliberately neutral. For most of the paper we steer clear of concepts like “aid effectiveness” and “aid dependence” that presuppose a behavioral analysis of the aid relationship. While intensity and effectiveness may be closely related under particular circumstances, the two are clearly distinct. Burnside and Dollar (1996)), for example, find that when countries of disparate institutional and policy environments are pooled together, there is no systematic relationship between the intensity of aid and its effectiveness in raising the recipient’s economic growth rate. Aid dependence is a murkier concept that is often directly conflated with aid intensity, as by the World Bank in its annual World Development Indicators.2 But this ignores the essentially intertemporal nature of dependency while implicitly locating dependency in the recipient rather than the donor. The disparate experiences of countries like Botswana and Uganda bring out a clear distinc
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