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This study examines the effects of greenfield FDI and cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As) on government size in host countries of FDI. Using panel data for up to 130 countries for the period from 2003-2011, the study specifically tests the compensation hypothesis, suggesting that by increasing economic insecurity, economic openness leads to larger government size. It is found that greenfield FDI increases labour market volatility and thereby economic insecurity while M&As are not significantly associated with labour market volatility. The main results of this study are that greenfield FDI has a robust positive effect on government size, while M&As have no statistically significant effect on government size in the total sample of developed and developing countries, as well as in the sub-samples of developed and developing countries.

We estimate gravity-type models to assess the effects of financial market development in the host and source countries on bilateral FDI stocks. We address potential reverse causality, inter alia by performing instrumental variable estimations and restricting the sample to observations where reverse causality, if existent, should be less relevant. Our major and robust finding is that bilateral FDI increases with better developed financial markets in both the host and the source country. Furthermore, for developing host countries, we find evidence that financial market development in source and host countries function as substitutes for each other.

The question of whether aid recipient countries would benefit from stronger income effects if foreign donors provided higher quality aid has received scant attention so far. We make use of the ranking of donors by the Center for Global Development to compare the effects of quality-adjusted aid and unadjusted aid on changes in GDP per capita. Our difference-in-difference-in-differences analysis reveals significant treatment effects for quality-adjusted aid, while we do not find significant treatment effects for unadjusted aid. The quality of aid matters most when accounting for delayed effects. However, our results depend on the sample of recipient countries.

Donor reactions to recent settlements of internal conflicts have been highly diverse, in terms of both overall aid and its sectoral composition. The allocation of post-conflict aid tends to be needs-based by favoring particularly poor countries. There is no conclusive evidence, however, that the allocation was shaped by the severity and type of conflicts prior to settlement. Furthermore, the sustainability of conflict resolution appears to be unrelated to the amount and composition of post-conflict aid. These findings, though based on a limited number of post-conflict episodes, underscore concerns voiced by the OECD and non-governmental organizations that traditional approaches to post-conflict aid are not effective.

The effects of foreign aid on the endowment of recipient countries with infrastructure have received surprisingly little attention in the empirical literature. This paper addresses this question by performing difference-in-difference-in-differences estimations, with the treatment defined as steep increases in aid for infrastructure since a distinct change in donor behavior in 2005. Mitigating endogeneity concerns in this way, we consistently find aid for infrastructure to be ineffective in improving the recipient countries' endowment with infrastructure. This finding holds not only for an encompassing index of economic infrastructure, but also for sub-indices of infrastructure in transportation, communication, energy, and finance.

The recent boom of investor-state disputes filed under international investment agreements has fueled a controversial academic and policy debate. Despite its importance, there has been very little work to date on the impacts of compensation claims by investors on FDI flows to the responding host country. We study this question using a comprehensive dataset of FDI flows, compensation claims and bilateral investment treaty (BIT) participation. We allow for differential impacts of compensation claims against a host on inward FDI flows from BIT-partner and non-partner countries. Focusing on these differences allows us both to shed new light on how investment treaties might influence investor behavior, as well as allowing us to control for unobserved changes in the host-country investment climate. We find that BITs stimulate bilateral FDI flows from partner countries - but only so long as the host country has not had a claim brought against it to arbitration. When a host faces a claim, FDI from sources with a BIT in place falls significantly more than that from unprotected sources. Furthermore, after the host has faced a claim, the entry into force of new BITs is no longer associated with increased FDI flows.

Aid proliferation and a lack of coordination are widely recognized as serious problems for aid effectiveness, and donors have repeatedly promised to tackle them, e.g. in the Paris Declaration in 2005 and the Accra Agenda for Action in 2008. In this paper, we employ geocoded aid data from Uganda to assess whether the country's donors have increasingly specialized and better coordinated their aid activities at the district and sector level. Our findings point in the opposite direction: over the period 2006-2013, aid of most major donors in Uganda became more fragmented, and the duplication of aid efforts increased. There is tentative evidence that donors were more active in poorer parts of the country, which would provide some justification for clustered aid activities.

Acknowledging that aid proliferation and a lack of coordination impair aid effectiveness, donors have repeatedly promised to specialize and better coordinate their aid activities, most notably in the Paris Declaration of 2005. We exploit geocoded aid data from Malawi to assess whether the country's bilateral and multilateral donors have acted accordingly at the district and sector level. We do not find compelling evidence for increased aid specialization after the Paris Declaration, and the regional division of labor among donors may even have deteriorated. Our within-country evidence thus broadly corroborates what previous studies found at the national level of recipient countries.

We assess the role of capital goods imports and inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI) as transmission channels through which major emerging economies (BRICs, i.e., Brazil, Russian Federation, India and China) could catch up with advanced source countries in terms of total factor productivity (TFP). We find that the importance of these transmission mechanisms depends on the BRICs' local capacity to absorb superior technologies and on domestic investment.

Making use of considerably improved measures of infrastructure, we assess the impact of infrastructure on bilateral trade for a panel of 37 developed and emerging economies during the period 1995-2011. We find significant and non-linear effects of overall infrastructure and infrastructure in transportation, communication, energy, and finance on trade in consumption goods, capital goods, and intermediates. Our major findings prove to be robust to various modifications and extensions of the gravity model. Importantly, we still observe significant and non-linear effects of infrastructure on bilateral trade after accounting for potential reverse causality.

It is open to question whether the intensified worldwide competition for FDI has reduced its traditionally strong concentration in a few large and relatively advanced host countries. We calculate and decompose Theil indices to track changes in absolute and relative concentration of FDI during the period 1970-2013. We find that both absolute and relative concentration decreased when excluding offshore financial centers from the overall sample. In addition to the narrowing gap between OECD and non-OECD countries, the concentration across non-OECD countries declined – for major subgroups and for both the absolute and relative measures. Finally, recent developments indicate that low-income countries are no longer at the losing end of the competition for FDI.

Estimating two-step selection models, we find that more democratic governments are more likely to conclude preferential trade agreements (PTAs) and to agree to stricter investment provisions related to pre-establishment national treatment and investor-state dispute settlement in PTAs. This is surprising when considering the potentially high costs of litigation.

We argue that donors could improve the effectiveness of foreign aid by pursuing complementary and coherent non-aid policies. In particular, we hypothesize that aid from donors that are open to immigration has stronger growth effects than aid from closed donors. We estimate the aid-growth nexus in first differences to mitigate endogeneity concerns. Our empirical results support the hypothesis that donors' openness to immigration strengthens the growth effects of foreign aid.

Aid flows continue to be volatile and unpredictable, even though it is widely accepted that this erodes the effectiveness of foreign aid. We argue that fragmented donor-recipient relationships, notably the large number of minor aid relations that tend to be associated with donors' desire to have 'fly their flag' around the world, increase aid unpredictability. Our empirical analysis of the determinants of aid unpredictability suggests that aid becomes less predictable with more fragmented donor-recipient relationships. Specifically, the effect of fragmentation on overshooting previous spending plans is statistically highly significant and substantively important. In contrast, fragmented donor-recipient relationships have no effect on the shortfall of actual aid compared to donors' spending plans.

Our empirical estimations indicate that aid-for-trade granted by OECD donors strengthens the trade relations of recipient countries with other developing countries. By focusing on South-South trade we mitigate endogeneity concerns that have plagued analyses of trade between recipients and donors of aid-for-trade.

We construct comprehensive and comparable indices on the most relevant components of economic infrastructure. An unobserved components model is employed to cover the largest possible number of developing and developed countries over the period 1990-2010. We map major findings from the new indices on infrastructure and provide country rankings, which we also compare with subjective assessments of infrastructure in the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report. Finally, we exemplify possible applications related to trade and FDI. By overcoming several data limitations, our new global index can help assess the links between infrastructure and economic development more systematically.

NGOs are widely perceived to raise their flag in humanitarian hot-spots with strong media presence in order to attract higher private donations. We assess this hypothesis by comparing the changes in donations between US-based NGOs with and without activities in the four countries most affected by the tsunami in the Indian Ocean in 2004. Performing a difference-in-difference-in-differences (DDD) approach, we find only weak indications that private donors systematically and strongly preferred active over inactive NGOs.

Considering that primary commodity dependence continues to be a major problem of various lower income countries, we analyze whether Aid for Trade (AfT) has helped recipient countries upgrade and diversify their exports. Estimating an asymmetric and aggregated gravity model, we find that AfT has been effective in promoting recipient exports of manufactures - whereas the effects on primary commodities are typically insignificant. These findings hold not only for trade relations with donor countries but also in south-south trade with other developing countries.

Political proximity between donor and recipient governments may impair the effectiveness of aid by encouraging favoritism. By contrast, political misalignment between donor and recipient governments may render aid less effective by adding to transaction costs and giving rise to incentive problems. We test these competing hypotheses empirically by considering the political ideology of both governments along the left-right spectrum in augmented models on the economic growth effects of aid. Following the estimation approach of Clemens et al. (2012), we find that aid tends to be less effective when political ideology differs between the donor and the recipient.

Apart from altruistic reasons, NGOs may engage in developing countries under conditions of conflict and war in order to secure funding and survive in the 'market' of humanitarian relief and development assistance. Applying a difference-in-difference-in-differences approach, we analyze empirically whether the presence of US-based NGOs in Afghanistan and Iraq improved their chances of external funding. We find that NGOs being active in Afghanistan tended to benefit from easier access to official sources of funding after the US intervention, compared to NGOs staying away. Nevertheless, there is no compelling evidence that it pays for NGOs to engage where the United States intervenes militarily.

Development assistance has been criticized for a lack of coordination between aid donors. This paper argues that competition for export markets and political support prevents donor countries from closer coordination of aid activities. To test these hypotheses, we perform logit and fractional logit estimations for a large sample of recipient countries and aid activities since the early 1970s. Our empirical results reveal that export competition between donors is a major impediment to aid coordination. Tough less conclusive, we also find some evidence that donors' competition over political support prevents them from coordinating aid activities more closely.

Night lights could be a valuable proxy of economic activity at the subnational level when GDP data are lacking or of poor quality. Supplementing Henderson et al.'s (2012) analysis at the national level, we assess the stability of the elasticity of GDP with regard to night lights across regions in Brazil, India, the United States, and Western Europe. The relationship between regional GDP and night lights proves to be unstable, not only where regional GDP data may be unreliable but also where such data are of high quality. This suggests that night lights tend to be a poor proxy of regional economic activity.

Using count data on Indian joint ventures (JVs) and wholly owned subsidiaries (WOS), we present an empirical analysis of FDI-related ownership choices and their relation with host country characteristics and indicators of transaction costs. Our Negative Binomial regression models offer only weak support for the bargaining perspective, according to which JVs should be more likely if the host countries were particularly attractive in terms of market access or resource endowments. Geographical and cultural distance has ambiguous effects on the choice between JVs and WOS. The composition of FDI projects tends to shift toward WOS where investment risks are contained by bilateral treaties and better control of corruption.

We investigate the importance of geo-strategic and commercial motives for the allocation of German aid to 138 countries over the 1973-2010 period. We find that geo-strategic and - less robustly - commercial motives matter. When we relate geo-strategic and commercial motives to the political color of the German government in general, and the Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and the Federal Foreign Office in particular, we find their importance to increase under socialist leadership. Socialist leadership also decreases the amount of aid commitments, controlled for other factors.

Recent studies offer an ambiguous picture on the effectiveness of foreign aid in strengthening the export capacity of recipient countries. Moreover, the literature on aid for trade (AfT) has often neglected that exporters in the donor countries may be among the main beneficiaries. We hypothesize that AfT is as much in the self-interest of donor countries as it may have promoted the exports of recipient countries. We simultaneously estimate and compare the effects of AfT on trade in both directions. We find that AfT increases recipient exports to donors as well as recipient imports from donors. The first effect tends to dominate the latter, which contradicts the skeptical view that donors grant AfT primarily to promote their own export interests.

We analyze the concentration of FDI in India at the district level, based on project-specific location choices since the reform program in the early 1990s. The decomposition property of the Theil index allows us to trace changes over time in the overall concentration of FDI to changes in concentration between and within subgroups of districts. We also differentiate between major types and sources of FDI. We find that the extensive margin of concentration persistently increased, with an ever larger number of districts not attracting any projects. The intensive margin increased as well but the increase leveled off in the most recent past. These trends hold for essentially all types and sources of FDI, while the average level of concentration varies considerably between these types and sources.

We empirically assess the determinants of India's FDI outflows across a large sample of host countries in the 1996-2009 period. Based on gravity model specifications, we employ Poisson pseudo maximum likelihood (PPML) estimators. Major findings include: India's outward FDI is hardly affected by motives to access raw materials or superior technologies. Market-related factors appear to have dominated the location choices of Indian direct investors. A larger Indian diaspora in the host countries attracts more FDI. Finally, it seems that Indian direct investors are relatively resilient to weak institutions and economic instability in the host countries. However, we do not find robust evidence that India provides an alternative source of FDI for countries that traditional investors tend to avoid.

We address the question of whether foreign aid helps attract foreign direct investment (FDI). This could be achieved if well targeted aid removed critical impediments to higher FDI inflows. In particular, we test the hypothesis that aid for education is an effective means to increase FDI flows to host countries in Latin America where schooling and education appears to be inadequate from the viewpoint of foreign investors. We employ panel data techniques covering 21 Latin American countries over the period from 1984 to 2008. We find that aid for education has a statistically significant positive effect on FDI. This effect is robust to potential outliers, sample selection, alternative specifications and different estimation methods.

We analyze whether foreign direct investment (FDI) has contributed to the typically wide income gaps in five Latin American host countries. We perform country-specific and panel cointegration techniques to assess the long-run impact of inward FDI stocks on income inequality among households in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Uruguay. The panel cointegration analysis reveals a significant and positive effect on income inequality. Furthermore, FDI contributed to widening income gaps in all individual sample countries, except for Uruguay. Our findings are robust to the choice of different estimation methods. There is no evidence for reverse causality.

What determines the foreign aid effort of donor countries? We review the existing literature on donors' aid budgets and examine which of the suggested variables robustly determine aid effort, measured as Official Development Assistance (ODA) as a share of gross national income. More specifically, we empirically test 16 hypotheses using panel econometric methods for member countries of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) in the 1976-2008 period. To test for the robustness of our results, we extend our dataset to 48 possible determinants of aid budgets and apply an Extreme Bounds Analysis (EBA). In our fixed effects regressions, we find that aid inertia, the donor country's GDP per capita, the existence of an independent aid agency, and colonial history have a robust and quantitatively relevant impact on countries' aid efforts. Among the potential substitutes for aid, remittances exert a robust effect. Excluding year fixed effects, political globalization, Russian military capacity, peer effects, aid effectiveness, and government debt also play a significant role.

The targeting of foreign aid within recipient countries is largely unexplored territory. We help close this gap in empirical research on aid allocation by employing Poisson estimations on the determinants of the World Bank's choice of project locations at the district level in India. The evidence of needs-based location choices is very weak, even though World Bank activities tend to concentrate in relatively remote districts. Spatial lags prove to be significant and positive pointing to regional clustering. Institutional conditions matter insofar as project locations cluster in districts belonging to states with greater openness to trade. We do not find any evidence that location choices are affected by political patronage at the state or district level. However, the World Bank prefers districts where foreign direct investors may benefit from projects related to infrastructure.

NGOs could help scale up foreign aid efforts by mobilizing private donations. However, fundraising activities do not necessarily result in higher donations, and substitution effects between different sources of revenue may diminish the overall pool of NGOs' resources. This paper examines the determinants of private donations to US-based NGOs engaged in international development cooperation. We employ panel cointegration and causality techniques to analyze the interactions between private donations, government grants, commercial revenues and fundraising expenditures. According to our results, a marginal dollar spent on fundraising yields almost five dollars in new donations in the long run. Government grants crowd in private donations in the long run, whereas commercial revenues crowd out donations in the long run. Moreover, our panel vector error correction model reveals complex short-run dynamics.

This paper examines the long-run effect of foreign aid on income inequality for 21 recipient countries using panel cointegration techniques to control for omitted variable and endogeneity bias. We find that aid exerts an inequality increasing effect on income distribution.

Non-traditional source countries of FDI play an increasingly important role, notably in developing host countries. This raises the question of whether the determinants of FDI differ systematically between traditional and non-traditional source countries. We perform Logit and Poisson Pseudo Maximum Likelihood estimations drawing on UNCTAD's database on bilateral FDI flows, including various emerging and developing countries as sources of FDI outflows. We find that economic geography variables are more relevant for FDI from non-traditional sources, while non-traditional investors appear to be as risk adverse as traditional investors. Access to raw materials represents a less important driving force of FDI from non-traditional sources. The differences are less pronounced for other types of FDI.

This paper examines the long-run effect of FDI on health in developed countries. Using panel cointegration techniques, we find a significant and negative long-run effect.

We assess the location choices of 6,020 foreign and non-resident Indian investors at the level of Indian districts. Employing conditional logit models, we find that clustering of FDI is driven strongly by herding among investors from both, the same and other countries of origin. However, the behaviour of non-resident Indians and German investors is strikingly different from the general pattern.

The Monterrey Consensus agreed at the UN summit on Financing for Development in 2002 promised a breakthrough in terms of donor generosity, aid effectiveness and new means of financing. However, the development orientation of world leaders proved to be short-lived. This is even though our evaluation reveals progress since Monterrey in some areas, notably debt relief and private (FDI) flows. Calls for substantially scaling up regular aid had little effect, and financial innovations contributed only marginally to overall development financing so far. There is not much progress either from the perspective of critics focusing on the quality of aid. In particular, we find that the targeting of aid according to need and merit leaves much to be desired. The gap between words and deeds continues to be wide with regard to aid proliferation and donor coordination, too.

This paper argues that previous cross-country (panel) studies on the relationship between income inequality and health suffer from significant biases due to (i) omitted country-specific factors, (ii) endogeneity, and (iii) cross-country heterogeneity in the impact of inequality on health. Using panel cointegration techniques that are robust to omitted variables, endogenous regressors, and slope heterogeneity, we find that income inequality has, on average, a small, but robust and statistically significant positive impact on population health. Also, there is some evidence that inequality is endogenous in the sense that poor health leads to increased income inequality. Finally, we find that there are large cross-country differences in the effect of income inequality on health (in about 35 percent of the cases, the effect is negative).

We assess whether bilateral and multilateral donors of foreign aid specialized and coordinated their activities with other donors as agreed in the Paris Declaration of 2005. We account for donor heterogeneity, varying aid priorities and recipient characteristics in order to isolate changes in donor behaviour over time. Recent shifts in aid priorities, such as the rising importance of general budget support, have reduced the fragmentation of aid. Nevertheless, our results reveal that aid fragmentation persisted after the Paris Declaration and coordination among donors has even weakened.

This paper examines the relationship between foreign direct investment (FDI) and income inequality for a sample of ten European countries over the period 1980 to 2000. Using panel co-integration and causality techniques that are robust to omitted variables, slope heterogeneity, and endogenous regressors, we find that: (1) FDI has a positive short-run effect on income inequality in Europe, (2) the long-run effect of FDI on inequality, however, is negative on average, (3) long-run causality runs in both directions, suggesting that an increase in FDI reduces income inequality and, in turn, higher inequality leads to lower FDI inflows, and (4) there are large differences in the long-run effect of FDI on income inequality, with two countries (Ireland and Spain) exhibiting a positive relationship between FDI and income inequality.

Having passed the "market test", private aid is claimed by its proponents to be better-targeted than official development assistance (ODA). But empirical evidence is largely lacking. We contribute to closing this gap by performing a case study of Nestlé, one of the frontrunners among multinational corporations being actively involved in the alleviation of poverty. The targeting of Nestlé's aid is compared to that of Swiss ODA and NGO aid, testing for both altruistic and selfish aid motivations. It turns out that Nestlé favored more democratic but also more corrupt recipient countries. Moreover, Nestlé's aid clearly lacks focus in terms of targeting poor countries, which appears to be the downside of the strong link between commercial presence and aid. By contrast, Swiss ODA and NGO aid is more altruistic and poverty-oriented.

This study investigates the long-run relationships between inward FDI and economic outcomes in terms of value added and employment at the level of US states. Johansen's (1988) cointegration technique and Toda and Yamamoto's (1995) Granger causality tests are applied to data for the period of 1977 to 2001. We find cointegration as well as two-directional causality between FDI and outcome variables. This holds for both measures of FDI (stocks and employment in foreign affiliates) and independently of whether we consider the states' overall economy or their manufacturing sector.

Being closer to the poor, NGOs are widely believed to provide better targeted aid than state agencies. But empirical evidence is largely lacking. We contribute to closing this gap by drawing on an exceptionally detailed Swiss database that covers different forms of NGO aid and several official aid benchmarks. The differentiated Tobit estimations account for both altruistic and selfish aid motivations. It turns out that it depends on the source of NGO funding as well as the choice of the official benchmark whether or not NGOs provide better targeted aid. In contrast to widespread belief, however, the allocation of self-financed NGO aid reveals striking similarities to the allocation of official Swiss development aid.

Regional integration is often considered a means to improve member countries’ attractiveness to foreign direct investment (FDI). But regional integration agreements (RIAs) as well as FDI are too diverse to allow for generalized verdicts. Our case studies on Mercosur in Latin America, ASEAN and SAARC in Asia, and SADC in sub-Saharan Africa caution against high expectations in several respects. First, country-specific factors were often more important as a stimulus to FDI than regional integration per se. Second, member countries are unlikely to equally share RIA-induced FDI inflows, even though the larger and richer members are not necessarily the winners taking all. Third, the regional heavyweights Brazil, China, India, and the Rep. of South Africa have played a minor role so far in fostering effective regional integration through outward FDI.

We make use of a new and detailed database on FDI approvals since the early 1990s to address two major issues related to FDI and regional development in India in the post-reform period. First, we analyze the location choices of foreign investors. The evidence indicates that the concentration of FDI in a few relatively advanced regions may have prevented FDI effects from spreading across the Indian economy. Second, we evaluate whether the link between FDI and economic growth has become stronger in the aftermath of reforms. Various categories of FDI are indeed positively correlated with per-capita income growth across Indian states. However, it is only for the richer states that FDI appears to be associated with higher growth. FDI is thus likely to increase regional income disparity in India.

This paper investigates the effects of inward FDI on per-capita income and growth of the US states since the mid-1970s. Using a Markov chain approach, it shows that both quantitative and qualitative characteristics of FDI affect per-capita income and growth. Employment-intensive FDI, concentrated in richer states, has been conducive to income growth, while capital-intensive FDI, concentrated in poorer states, has not. FDI has consequently tended to slow down rather than foster income convergence among US states. It appears to be less important whether FDI has been undertaken in the manufacturing sector of US states or in other sectors.

We raise the question whether foreign direct investment (FDI) has contributed to employment generation in Mexico and, thereby, helped overcome the country's pressing labor market problems. The analysis draws on highly disaggregated FDI and employment data covering almost 200 manufacturing industries. We estimate dynamic labor demand functions for blue and white collar workers, including both FDI and its interaction with major industry characteristics. By employing the GMM estimator suggested by Arellano and Bond, we account for the relatively short time dimension of our panel (1994-2006). It turns out that FDI has a significantly positive, though quantitatively modest impact on manufacturing employment in Mexico. Moreover, we find no evidence supporting the widely held view that FDI adds to white collar employment in the first place. However, the positive effect on blue collar employment diminishes with increasing skill intensity of manufacturing industries.

This paper empirically analyzes the impact of aid on education for about 100 countries over the period 1970 - 2005. We estimate a system of equations to test whether and to what extent the impact of sector-specific aid on educational attainment depends on (i) the extent to which aid adds to overall educational expenditure of the recipient government, (ii) the strength of the link between government expenditure and education, (iii) the quality of institutions in the recipient country, and (iv) whether aid encourages institutional reforms. According to our results, aid significantly increases primary school enrolment. This result is robust to the method of estimation, employing instruments to control for the endogeneity of aid, and the measure of institutional quality employed. The degree of institutional quality, however, has no robust impact on this relationship.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) has boomed in post-reform India. Moreover, the composition and type of FDI has changed considerably since India has opened up to world markets. This has fuelled high expectations that FDI may serve as a catalyst to higher economic growth. We assess the growth implications of FDI in India by subjecting industry-specific FDI and output data to Granger causality tests within a panel cointegration framework. It turns out that the growth effects of FDI vary widely across sectors. FDI stocks and output are mutually reinforcing in the manufacturing sector. In sharp contrast, any causal relationship is absent in the primary sector. Most strikingly, we find only transitory effects of FDI on output in the services sector, which attracted the bulk of FDI in the post-reform era. These differences in the FDI-growth relationship suggest that FDI is unlikely to work wonders in India if only remaining regulations were relaxed and still more industries opened up to FDI.

Using panel data for 143 countries over the period 1973 - 2002, this paper empirically analyzes the influence of US aid on voting patterns in the UN General Assembly. We use disaggregated aid data to account for the fact that various forms of aid may differ in their ability to induce political support by recipients. We obtain strong evidence that US aid buys voting compliance in the Assembly. More specifically, our results suggest that general budget support and untied grants are the major aid categories by which recipients have been induced to vote in line with the United States. When replicating the analysis for other G7 donors, no comparable patterns emerge.