Does Aid for Education Educate Children? Evidence from Panel Data

By Axel Dreher, Peter Nunnenkamp, Rainer Thiele. 2006

284 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Development, Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/86e6a2bcf98f97440ce4f9003d481dae7c65e4cf

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Citations in the corpus

Making Aid Work for Education in Developing Countries: an Analysis of Aid Effectiveness for Primary Education Coverage and Quality (2016, methodology): “While the lack of appropriate data thus excludes a reliable panel data analysis for developing countries, student assessment programmes do exist, even for SSA, and they even provide repeated country-level information for up to three different survey periods.”
Foreign Aid, FDI and Economic Growth in South-East Asia and South Asia (2020, background): “Dreher, Nunnenkamp, and Thiele (2008), and D’Aiglepierre and Wagner (2013) find educational aid to be effective in improving educational outcomes.”
The Politics of Effective Foreign Aid (2010, background): “…researchers to more precisely assess the causal effect of aid on particular outcomes, such as health (Gebhard et al. 2008, Ravishankar et al. 2009), education (Dreher et al. 2008), the environment (Hicks et al. 2008), and democracy (Finkel et al. 2007, Stevens et al. 2007, Nielsen & Nielson 2008).”
Counting Chickens when they Hatch: Timing and the Effects of Aid on Growth* (2012, unknown): “Other strands of this literature investigate aid effects beyond growth, such as schooling (Dreher et al., 2008) and governance (Knack and Rahman, 2007; Djankov et al.”
The Effectiveness of Foreign Aid to Education: What Can Be Learned? (2016, methodology): “Another longitudinal study (Dreher et al., 2008) analyses the overall impact of aid over several decades using a production function approach covering 96 low and middle-income countries from 1970 to 2004. Their results indicate an impact of aid approximately two to three times higher than the estima”