Bilateral aid in sub-Saharan Africa: are donor delivery tactics stimulating economic growth and development?

Abstract

The literature assessing the effectiveness of bilateral foreign aid flows to sub-Saharan Africa primarily focus on one aspect of the aid delivery mechanism that is employed by donors, namely that of channeling aid to recipient central governments. These analyses do not take into account alternative donor delivery tactics of circumventing recipient governments with poor institutional quality – delivering aid to non-state (‘bypass’) actors instead. Thus, the objective of this paper is to extend the aid effectiveness literature by disaggregating bilateral aid flows into both government-to-government aid and bypass aid, and assessing their relative effect on economic growth. Utilising data compiled from multiple data sources including the OECD Credit Reporting Services and World Bank datasets, I find that whereas the effect of government-to-government aid on economic growth is conditional on institutional quality, bypass aid is unconditionally effective.

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