Developing Governance: A study into the relation between development aid and the quality of government in recipient countries

This study looks into the results of the recent 15-year big development aid push, which occurred under the Millennium Development Goals (MDG’s). One of the main topics of the development agenda was and to this day is, a focus on the development of different aspects of governance within the recipient country. By using a recently developed indicator, which claims improved accuracy in measuring the amount of actual development aid provided by donor countries, the effect of aid on the quality of government (QOG) in recipient states is examined. In a cross-country regression of 144 countries and including appropriate lags for the measured aid, this study finds hints for a very weak positive relation of aid on QOG, but fails to uncover statistically significant results.