Aid & Development
To what extent does foreign aid help developing countries reach sustainable development goals and how can the international community make development finance more efficient in this respect?
Our research investigates aid effectiveness using a disaggregated approach to shed light on sector-, donor- and location-specific aid impacts. We are interested both in how well different aid flows meet their intended objectives, and in possible externalities, or unintended consequences, of aid.
Works in progress (selection)
Tengstam, S. and A-S Isaksson (2021) “Kill your darlings? Do new aid flows help achieve a poverty minimizing allocation of aid?”, IFN working paper No. 1415, 2021.
Isaksson, A-S and D. Durevall (2021) ”Aid and institutions: Local effects of World Bank aid on perceived institutional quality in Africa”, AidData Working Paper No 111, 2021
Recent publications
Ann-Sofie Isaksson, Dick Durevall, ”Lokala effekter av bistånd på tilltron till institutioner”, Ekonomisk Debatt, nr 1, 2022
Isaksson, A-S (2021) “Rapid and Rigorous Impact Evaluation: Advances in the Methods and Data Available for Timely and Cost-Efficient Evaluation”, Center for Global Development
Durevall, Dick (2020) "Fairtrade and Market Efficiency: Fairtrade-Labeled Coffee in the Swedish Coffee Market", Economies
Isaksson, A-S (2020) “Chinese aid and local ethnic identification”, International Organization
Isaksson, A-S and A. Kotsadam (2020) “Chinese Aid to Africa: Distinguishing Features and Local Effects”, CESifo Forum 21(2)
Isaksson, A-S and A. Kotsadam (2018) “Chinese aid and local corruption”, Journal of Public Economics, vol. 159
Isaksson, A-S and A. Kotsadam (2018) Racing to the bottom? Chinese development projects and trade union involvement in Africa”, World Development, vol. 106,
Isaksson, A. (2017) "Geospatial analysis of aid: A new approach to aid evaluation", EBA report 2017:09.
Arne Bigsten and Sven Tengstam: “International Coordination and the Effectiveness of Aid”, World Development, 69(4): 75-85, 2015.