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In recent decades ranking has become an increasingly important feature of an academic's life. Individuals, journals, universities and departments are all ranked. To an extent this is an inherent part of what we have always done, as professors we rank students and we tend to rank them into one of four categories. As Sgroi and Oswald observe, in this symposium, rightly or wrongly the United Kingdom has been a leader in formal ways to measure the research performance of universities

The paper examines the effect of aid on poverty, rather than on economic growth. We devise a ‘pro-poor (public) expenditure index’, and present evidence that, together with inequality and corruption, this is a key determinant of the aid's poverty leverage. After presenting empirical evidence which suggests a positive leverage of aid donors on pro-poor expenditure, we argue for the development of conditionality in a new form, which gives greater flexibility to donors in punishing slippage on previous commitments, and keys aid disbursements to performance in respect of policy variables which governments can influence in a pro-poor direction.

The debate on the impact of aid on the economies of developing countries is a rapidly evolving one. Early studies by, e.g., Papanek (1972) reported a positive impact of aid on growth within a multiple regression context. This conclusion allowed policy makers to entertain the possibility that poverty across the world could be largely eradicated, that countries could be moved out of poverty through the allocation of aid and that the following of successful policies would allow them to generate increased prosperity from their own resources. Unfortunately after some thirty years the poor are still with us, poverty shows relatively little signs of disappearing and until recently enthusiasm for aid amongst donors had declined. The papers in this symposium examine the effectiveness of aid in the past and its potential in the future. A number of economic studies help explain this apparent failure. Mosley et al. (1987) found it impossible to establish any significant relationship between aid and the growth rate of developing countries. They suggested that this might be because of the possibility of leakages into non-productive expenditure in the public sector and the transmission of negative price effects to the private sector. They also argued for the targeting of aid, i.e. its allocation to countries where it would be used most effectively. Boone (1996) concluded that aid does not significantly increase growth nor benefit the poor. It did however increase the size of the government. But again the message was not entirely negative in terms of what aid could achieve and argued for the targeting of aid, this time at liberal democratic regimes, as they appeared more effective in, for example, reducing infant mortality. Hence, until recently, the dominant view within economics had become pessimistic with respect to the past effectiveness of aid but, somewhat optimistically perhaps, held out the hope for improvement on the basis of aid targeting. More recently, however, work by Burnside and Dollar (2000) was to put forward a more optimistic view of the former. They concluded that aid had a positive impact on growth for developing countries with good fiscal, monetary and trade policies in place but had little impact for those countries who were following poor policies. This therefore, partially at least, provided an explanation of why aid had been found to have little positive impact on growth in previous empirical work. It also provided specific criteria for targeting aid. This was then built upon by Collier and Dollar (2001, 2002) who calculated a 'poverty efficient allocation of aid' which focused on those countries with a combination of most poverty and best policies. They suggested that targeting of aid in this manner would almost double its effectiveness in reducing poverty. This work has had an extraordinary impact upon policy and Easterly (2003), as well as Dalgaard, Hansen and Tarp (DHT) in this symposium, document how it

The article in this JOURNAL by Mosley et al. (I987) concludes its analysis of aid effectiveness as demonstrating '... inability of development aid over more than twenty years to provide a net increment to overall growth in the Third World' (p. 636). This note purports to show that this conclusion, which is ostensibly 'distressing' as the authors claim, is not warranted. The section of the study which is the basis of the conclusion cited and the subject of this note is a cross-section regression analysis, full details of which are shown in Mosley et al. Table 3. The note is concerned with the relation between the dependent variable specified as the growth rate of real GDP per cent per annum (hereafter GDP) and aid specified as a percentage of GDP (hereafter Aid).' The Aid results, with only two significant positive coefficients in one subsample, certainly give no basis for claiming aid-effectiveness in terms of GDP growth. The intention in this note is to interpret the results which are assumed to be valid. This is made possible by the fact that the authors have helpfully provided the full input set of mean values derived from the raw data. From this it is possible to calculate the GDP/Aid relationship for each country for the second and third period. The procedure for deriving these relationships is as follows. For each country the mean values of the time series of GDP and Aid are extracted from the data for I 960-70 and for I 970-80. Using I 960-70 as the base, the signs of the change in the levels of the GDP and Aid mean values between periods are recorded. This is repeated for I980-4 with I970-80 mean values as the base. The relationship between the two signs is an indication of the effect of Aid on GDP in the period in which the change in levels is effected. Thus in the case of an increase in Aid being combined with a decrease in GDP the latter must have fallen relatively to the former and aid-effectiveness is negative; Mutatis mutandis, for the other three sign combinations, thus generating the appropriate GDP/Aid relationship for each country in each period. A frequency distribution of the four sign-combinations, relating to the full sample, is presented in Table I. Since the signs of the changes in the levels of GDP and Aid are derived by making explicit the arithmetic relationship implicit in the data they form a valid base from which to draw conclusions without requiring any test of

This study examines people's aversion to inflation and unemployment in the United Kingdom. The little empirical work which has been done in this area, by Hibbs (1979) and Fischer and Huizinga (1982), is based on American data and tends to support the general view that it is creditors who are most concerned with inflation. The time series data on which the first part of this study is based, were obtained from Gallup's monthly quota sample survey of about 1000 individuals. The data in March, June, September and December were taken a? representative of the first, second, third and fourth quarters respectively, and cover the period 1970(4)-1983(4). The specific question asked was "What would you say is the most urgent problem facing the country at this present time?" The unemployment and inflation aversion data were found from those answering 'unemployment', and the 'cost of living' respectively. Other options open to people varied over time, and included strikes, Ireland, housing, immigration, the fuel shortage and defence. None was continuously mentioned throughout the period, although several did become temporarily very important. An individual's aversion to the i'th issue can)be expressed as a linear function of a vector of attributes, zi, a coefficient vector bi, and ui a random error term reflecting differences in individual characteristics. Provided the error terms are statistically independent Weibull variables, then it can be shown that the logged ratio ofthe sample probabilities that the most important problem is inflation (P 1) or unemployment (P2) is