In a report presented at the UN Conference on Financing for Development in March 2002, the World Bank claims that the effectiveness of its financial aid has improved substantially by targeting aid at poor developing countries pursuing sound economic policies. However, the World Bank's success...

For FDI to help achieve the international development goal of halving absolute poverty, two conditions have to be met. First, poor developing countries need to be attractive to foreign investors. Second, the host-country environment in which foreign investors operate must be conducive to...

There is a startling gap between, allegedly, globalization-induced changes in international competition for foreign direct investment (FDI) and recent empirical evidence on the relative importance of determinants of FDI in developing countries. We show that surprisingly little has changed since...