Donors, neo-liberalism and country ownership in Southeast Asia

Abstract

During the 1990s and early 2000s, much of the scholarly and policy-oriented literature on aid effectiveness suggested that aid had done little to promote economic growth in developing countries or had had a positive impact on growth only in countries that had ‘sound’ policies and institutions (Dollar and Pritchett 1998; Burnside and Dollar 2000; Easterly 2006). At the same time, several scholars produced evidence to suggest that policy conditionality had been ineffective in promoting economic policy reform in developing countries - in one influential study, for instance, Dollar and Pritchett (1998) found that conditionality did not guarantee that reforms would be carried out, or be successfu..