Aid for Trade and Greenfield Investment

The Aid for Trade (AfT) Initiative was launched in 2005 at the Hong Kong Ministerial Conference where high-income countries pledged to increase their AfT contributions to developing countries. AfT, comprised almost entirely of aid for trade-related infrastructure and building productive capacity, would promote growth by easing supply-side constraints and improving transportation, energy, and communication infrastructure. By lowering costs of operating in recipient countries, AfT may increase both trade and investment. Most research on the effects of AfT on international transactions focuses on trade. The sparse research on investment investigates aid and net foreign direct investment flows based on the international balance of payments. We contribute to the literature by assessing AfT effects on new greenfield investment. Using bilateral data for 25 donor and 120 recipient countries for the period 2003-13, we find that bilateral AfT promotes greenfield investment. Our preferred specification includes bilateral and country-time fixed effects and employs the Poisson Pseudo-Maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimator. Robust effects emerge between the top five donors and more developed recipient countries, cases where aid flows are large. Thus, we see evidence that a critical level of aid is required to encourage greenfield investment. Both aid for infrastructure (particularly, transportation and energy) and building productive capacity are found to exert strong effects. To the extent that greenfield investment creates jobs and generates technology transfer, it appears that AfT is accomplishing its development objectives, at least with regard to the more advanced recipient countries. (c) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.