Does Foreign Aid Really Work?

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Intro; CONTENTS; LIST OF FIGURES; LIST OF TABLES; LIST OF BOXES; PREFACE; LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS; 1. 'A good thing?'; The aid revival; A different book on aid; Outline of the book; PART I: THE COMPLEX WORLDS OF FOREIGN AID; 2. The origins and early decades of aid-giving; Defining aid; A snapshot of the history of aid; The origins of aid: the pre-1949 era; The 1950s to the 1960s; 3. Aid-giving from the 1970s to the present; The 1970s and 1980s; From the 1990s to today; 4. The growing web of bilateral aid donors; The ever-increasing number of donors The explosion in the numbers of non-governmental organizationsThe main bilateral donors; The smaller bilateral donors; 5. The complexities of multilateral aid; What is multilateral aid and how much of it is there?; The international financial institutions; The United Nations, development and aid; Other multilateral agencies; Systemic issues; PART II: WHY IS AID GIVEN?; 6. The political and commercial dimensions of aid; Why governments give aid; Politics and national self-interest in aid-giving; Commercial interests in aid-giving The overall impact of political and commercial influences on aidConcluding comments; 7. Public support for aid; Trends in public support; The reliability of public opinion surveys; Public support for aid and public perception of its effectiveness; 8. Charity or duty? The moral case for aid; Facts on the ground; Ethical theories and approaches; 9. The moral case for governments and individuals to provide aid; Donor governments: current and evolving views; Aid and the nature of governments' moral obligations; Ethics, voluntary aid-giving and the world of NGOs; PART III: DOES AID REALLY WORK? 10. Assessing and measuring the impact of aidMethodological challenges and data-gaps; Judging the impact and performance of aid: what questions need to be asked?; Understanding how aid contributes to growth and development; Expectations about the impact of aid; 11. The impact of official development aid projects; Project aid: an overview; Detailed project performance; Data quality and the sustainability of official aid projects; The wider picture; Summing up; 12. The impact of programme aid, technical assistance and aid for capacity development; Programme aid; Technical assistance Aid for capacity building13. The impact of aid at the country and cross-country level; The country-level impact of aid; The impact of official development aid across countries; 14. Assessing the impact of aid conditionality; Aggregate aid impact and the policy environment; Official donor conditionality and recipient response; Does policy conditionality produce the results intended?; Summing up; 15. Does official development aid really work? A summing up; The search for sustainability; Effectiveness does matter; 16. NGOs in development and the impact of discrete NGO development interventions