Aid Intensity In Africa

Aid to sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is falling rapidly, after reaching historically high levels in the early 1990s. We provide a critical review of aid data and place the resource intensity of current flows in crosscountry and intertemporal perspective. Aid to SSA is not unusually high given the structural characteristics of African countries, but it rose more rapidly than predicted until the mid-1990s. We introduce the concept of transactions intensity and show that by some measures, the management costs accompanying each dollar of aid to Africa are comparatively high