Reinventing Foreign Aid

✍ Scribed by William R. Easterly

• Publisher: MIT Press
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 581
• Edition: illustrated edition
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This collection of studies illuminates one of (probably THE) problem with the theories and practice of development assistance: we just don't know what we're doing, and don't really understand the effects of our actions. This book, along with others, should become required reading within the development institutions. It should also incite those institutions and their staff to greater modesty as they go about their work -- modesty to the point of admitting their agnosticism.

✦ Table of Contents

Contents......Page 6
Foreword......Page 10
1 Introduction: Can’t Take It Anymore?......Page 14
2 Making Aid Work......Page 60
3 Use of Randomization in the Evaluation of Development Effectiveness......Page 106
4 It Pays to Be Ignorant: A Simple Political Economy of Rigorous Program Evaluation......Page 134
5 Solutions When the Solution Is the Problem: Arraying the Disarray in Development......Page 160
6 Donors and Service Delivery......Page 192
7 The Illusion of Sustainability......Page 214
8 An Aid-Institutions Paradox? A Review Essay on Aid Dependency and State Building in Sub-Saharan Africa......Page 268
9 Why Do Aid Agencies Exist?......Page 298
10 Absorption Capacity and Disbursement Constraints......Page 324
11 Donor Fragmentation......Page 346
12 The IMF and Economic Development......Page 364
13 The Knowledge Bank......Page 390
14 Debt Relief and Fiscal Sustainability for Heavily Indebted Poor Countries......Page 412
15 Making Vaccines Pay......Page 430
16 Can We Build a Better Mousetrap? Three New Institutions Designed to Improve Aid Effectiveness......Page 444
17 Competing with Central Planning: Marketplaces for International Aid......Page 474
18 Placing Enterprise and Business Thinking at the Heart of the War on Poverty......Page 498
19 Avoid Hubris: And Other Lessons for Reformers......Page 518
20 Seven Deadly Sins: Reflections on Donor Failings......Page 528
Contributors......Page 566
Index......Page 568