Financial sector foreign aid and financial intermediation

Abstract

The effectiveness of foreign aid is typically measured by the effect of aid on economic growth. Prior literature provides ambiguous results on this effect partly due to the aggregation of aid to different sectors and the small amount of foreign aid relative to the economy in most countries. Because growth in financial intermediation and financial markets has been shown to play a key role in spurring economic growth, in this paper we focus on aid to the financial sector and seek to identify the causal effects of foreign aid to the financial sector on financial intermediation. Using fixed effects OLS and system GMM methods for a panel of countries from 1993 to 2016, we find that foreign aid to the financial sector primarily increases claims on the government sector, and has negative or neutral effect on claims to the private sector and no effect on liquid liabilities of the banking sector and interest rate spread between borrowing and lending rates. This effect persists even after controlling for country institutional characteristics, such as trade openness and rule of law. Thus, foreign aid increases public sector borrowing but does not appear to have any benefits for financial intermediation in the private sector. We verify that the relation is not spurious by using aid to the health sector for falsification tests.