Can Foreign Aid Accelerate Stabilisation

This paper studies the effect of foreign aid on economic stabilization. Following Alberto Alesina and Allan Drazen (1991), the authors model the delay in stabilizing as the result of a distributional struggle. Since the delay is used to signal each faction's strength, the effect of the transfer depends on the role it plays in the release of information. The authors show that this role depends on the timing of the transfer: foreign aid decided and transferred sufficiently early into the game leads to earlier stabilization; but aid decided or transferred too late is destabilizing and encourages further postponement of reforms. Copyright 1996 by Royal Economic Society.