Aid, policy and growth in post-conflict societies

By Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler. 2002

673 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Countries emerging from civil war attract both aid and policy advice. This paper provides the first systematic empirical analysis of aid and policy reform in the post-conflict growth process. It is based on a comprehensive data set of large civil wars and covers 27 countries that were in their first decade of post-conflict economic recovery during the 1990s. The authors first investigate whether the absorptive capacity for aid is systematically different in post-conflict countries. They find that during the first three post-conflict years, absorptive capacity is no greater than normal, but that in the rest of the first decade it is approximately double its normal level. So ideally, aid should phase in during the decade. Historically, aid has not, on average, been higher in post-conflict societies, and it has tended to taper out over the course of the decade. The authors then investigate whether the contribution of policy to growth is systematically different in post-conflict countries, and in particular, whether particular components of policy are differentially important. For this they use the World Bank policy rating database. The authors find that growth is more sensitive to policy in post-conflict societies. Comparing the efficacy of different policies, they find that social policies are differentially important relative to macroeconomic policies. However, historically, this does not appear to have been how policy reform has been prioritized in post-conflict societies.

Subfields: Development, Information Systems, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f61736d13f8441cd316e492a5b52826b4d6591df

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Citations in the corpus

The Aftermath of Civil War (2007, background): “Collier and Hoeffler (2004) provide a systematic empirical analysis of aid and policy reform in the post-conflict growth process, based on a comprehensive data set of large civil wars covering 17 societies during their first decade of post-conflict economic recovery.”
Economics and Violent Conflict (2003, background): “In fact there need be no correlation whatsoever between between-group inequality and overall inequality.. 31 See especially Collier and Hoeffler 2000a, 2002a, and 2002b. 32 Different versions of this research vary in the extent to which evidence for “greed” simply means evidence for opportunity.”
An Economic Vulnerability Index: Its Design and Use for International Development Policy (2009, background): “When export instability, weighted by the openness rate, is introduced into a conflict occurrence model a la Collier–Hoeffler ( 2004 ), not only does the coefficient of determination increase significantly, but also the share of primary commodities in exports becomes insignificant (Guillaumont et ”
Making Progress on Foreign Aid (2015, positive): “Svensson (2000) finds that foreign aid, like trade windfalls, increase corruption in a panel of 10Roodman (2007) focuses on Dollar & Burnside (2000), Collier & Dehn (2001), Collier & Dollar (2002), Collier & Hoeffler (2004), Hansen & Tarp (2001), Dalgaard et al (2004), Guillaumont & Chauvet (2001).”
Can the West Save Africa (2008, neutral): “conditional cash transfers, or CCT) has led to several infl uential studies using a randomized design. Schultz (2004) found that schooling among the benefi ciaries did increase signifi cantly, estimating the long run effect as 0.”
It Works; It Doesn't; It Can, But That Depends (2006, background): “Roodman (2004) submits not only the Burnside–Dollar results, but also those of Collier and Dehn (2001), Collier and Hoeffler (2002), and Collier and Dollar (2002) , to a battery of additional tests relating to specification differences, variable definitions and, like Easterly et al. (2004) sample…”
“GOOD GOVERNANCE” AND THE EXTRACTIVE INDUSTRIES IN SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA (2008, background): “…2002; Ross 2004b) suggest that there is a strong correlation between such resources and political disorder; and, by extension, that lootable wealth has the propensity to fuel ‘‘greed-based’’ insurgency in collapsed states (Berdal 2005; Collier and Hoeffler 2004; Korf 2005; Regan and Norton 2005).”
Resource Rents, Governance, and Conflict (2005, background): “In Collier and Hoeffler (2002), we found that aid has no effect other than through its effect on growth, which was benign.”
The Anarchy of Numbers (2007, background): “The first and last prove positive and sig- 5 Collier and Hoeffler (2002) make a small correction to the Collier and Dollar data set, excluding 5 observations where a missing value had been treated as 0.”