In Search For A Long-Run Relationship Between Aid And Growth: Pitfalls And Findings

In this paper, the authors investigate the relationship between per capita income and foreign aid for a panel of 131 (alternatively 52) recipient countries over the period 1960 to 2006 by employing annual data and 5-year averages. Reliance on standard panel estimation techniques, such as 2-ways FE estimation, panel GMM and SUR estimation, points to some pitfalls (impossibility of possible cointegration between aid and growth, autocorrelation of the error terms, endogeneity of the variables) that must be dealt with panel time series techniques (such as panel unit root test, panel cointegration tests and panel Dynamic Feasible Generalized Least Squares estimation (DFGLS)).