Aid for Trade and Greenfield Investment

Using bilateral data for 25 donor and 120 recipient countries for the period 2003-13, we find that bilateral AfT promotes greenfield investment. Our preferred specification includes bilateral and country-time fixed effects and employs the Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimator. Robust effects emerge between the top five donors and more developed recipient countries, cases where aid flows are large. Thus, we see evidence that a critical level of aid is required to encourage greenfield investment. Both aid for infrastructure (particularly, transportation and energy) and building productive capacity are found to exert strong effects. To the extent that greenfield investment creates jobs and generates technology transfer, it appears that AfT is accomplishing its development objectives, at least with regard to the more advanced recipient countries.