(Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Rzeszowskiego, 2014) Nowak, Wioletta
Since the beginning of the1960s, developed countries have spent over USD 3 trillion on official development assistance to promote economic growth and development in developing countries. Over the last few decades not only major donors but also aid objectives have been changing. The aid objectives reflected changes in geopolitics, the development objectives and views on the development process. Foreign aid very often was treated as an important tool of donors’ foreign and commercial policies. Theoretical studies developed in the sixties support the positive relationship between the foreign aid and economic growth. Two-gap model was used as the basis for calculation of aid requirements. The empirical research on the effectiveness of development aid are extensive and multidimensional. However, their results and conclusions are ambiguous. Principally there are two main strands of the literature on the relationship between foreign aid and economic growth. One group of studies claims that there is the positive aid-growth correlation, the second argues that this correlation is negative. Positive correlation between the foreign aid and economic growth can be either unconditional or conditional. In the second case the aid effectiveness depends on many different factors. The most important are specific conditions in the recipient countries, macroeconomic policy, geographical location, levels of aid allocation and aid modalities.
