Aid effectiveness, governance and public investment

In this paper, we develop a growth model in which aid finances infrastructure investment and pro-poor spending in order to analyze ways through which aid can be made more effective. We assume that the recipient countries are aid-dependent in the early phase of development and that they ultimately become independent. In the model, donors can accelerate a recipient's independence from aid by investing in infrastructure. We demonstrate that even a small increase in aid can improve aid effectiveness and that aid effectiveness depends more on the growth rate than on the efficiency of the government.