Nancy Qian has an excellent review paper on foreign aid called Making Progress on Foreign Aid.* There are a lot of interesting findings in this paper, and it’s definitely worth reading in its entirety, although I disagree a bit with the optimism of the title.
Here are some of the most interesting results in my opinion:
“The literature shows that the primary purpose of aid is often not to alleviate poverty and that out of all of the foreign aid flows, only 1.69% to 5.25% are given to the poorest twenty percent of countries in any given year.” I knew the percentage was low but I didn’t expect it to be this low. Important to keep in mind if you’re trying to make any sweeping generalizations about extreme poverty and aid.
Speaking of which, it is almost impossible to draw meaningful conclusions about the effectiveness of aid because it…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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