Previous studies have shown, however, that aid is ineffective and recommend comprehensive restructuring of the common aid practices. Investigations that analyse the pattern of aid flows find, moreover, that granting aid to certain recipient countries cannot only be explained be altruistic motives. They show that several strategic or non-strategic reasons have a high explanatory power for individual donor aid allocation.
Against this background, the present master thesis explores aid effectiveness of distinct bilateral donors. This is achieved by a large-scale panel data analysis applying per-capita economic growth, infant mortality and primary growth as indicators for measuring the contribution of aid to achieving the different SDGs.
The study confirms previous findings that aid is widely ineffective. However, it also shows that aid effectiveness varies considerably between different bilateral donors. Whereas aid from one group of Nordic donor countries proves to correlate significantly positive with growth over various different methods, this cannot be determined for another group]]>