In March I recounted how former colleagues Michael Clemens, Steven Radelet, and Rikhil Bhavnani wrote an excellent paper in 2004 on the impact of foreign aid on economic growth, “Counting Chickens When They Hatch.” The idea captured in that title is that it is important to think about the likely timing of the impacts of aid. Don’t design your analysis as if you expect that funding for teaching 6-year-olds will raise economic growth in four years. Match the follow-up period to the type of aid. Count your chickens only when they hatch.

Some years later, and joined by another CGD recruit, Samuel Bazzi, those authors overhauled their paper and published it in the top-flight Economic Journal (ungated version). The final version is quite different but also excellent (it won the journal’s best-article prize). Instead of doing its own econometrics afresh, it modifies the three most-cited studies in the aid-growth literature in light of the “counting chickens” insight. Although those studies disagree on whether and when aid “works,” in the sense of boosting growth, Clemens, Radelet, Bhavnani, and Bazzi (CRBB) conclude that revising the studies to take timing into account causes all results to converge, to a ginger but positive appraisal. (Listen to Michael speak cautionarily about “Chickens” in this Library of Economics and Liberty podcast.)

I say “excellent” and I mean it. But, true to type, I actually doubt the econometric reasoning. I am not persuaded by these results that “aid inflows are systematically associated with modest, positive subsequent growth.” Continue reading →