We provide new measures of ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization for about 190 countries. These measures are more comprehensive than those previously used in the economics literature and we compare our new variables with those previously used. We also revisit the question of the effects of ethnic, linguistic and religious fractionalization on quality of institutions and growth. We partly confirm and partly modify previous results. The patterns of cross-correlations between potential explanatory variables and their different degree of endogeneity makes it hard to make unqualified statements about competing explanations for economic growth and the quality of government . . . 

The widely publicized finding that “aid promotes growth in a good policy environment” is not robust to the inclusion of new data or alternative definitions of “aid”, “policy” or “growth”. The idea that “aid buys growth” is on shaky ground theoretically and empirically. It doesn’t help that aid agencies face poor incentives to deliver results and underinvest in enforcing aid conditions and performing scientific evaluations. Aid should set more modest goals, like helping some of the people some of the time, rather than trying to be the catalyst for society-wide transformation . . . 
William Easterly

Does economic development depend on geographic endowments like temperate instead of tropical location, the ecological conditions shaping diseases, or an environment good for grains or certain cash crops? Or do these endowments of tropics, germs, and crops affect economic development only through institutions or policies? We test the endowment, institution, and policy views against each other using cross country evidence. We find evidence that tropics, germs, and crops affect development through institutions. We find no evidence that endowments affect country incomes directly other than through institutions, nor do we find any effect of policies on development once we control for institutions . . . 

A group of well-meaning national and international bureaucracies dispensed foreign aid under conditions in which bureaucracy does not work well. The environment that created aid bureaucracies led those organizations to (a) define their output as money disbursed rather than service delivered, (b) produce many low-return observable outputs like glossy reports and “frameworks” and few high-return less observable activities like ex-post evaluation, (c) engage in obfuscation, spin control, and amnesia (like always describing aid efforts as “new and improved”) so that there is little learning from the past, (d) put enormous demands on scarce administrative skills in poor countries. To change this unhappy equilibrium, policymakers in rich and poor countries should experiment with decentralized markets to match those who want to help the poor with the poor themselves freely expressing their needs and aspirations . . . 
William Easterly, Alberto Alesina, Arnaud Devleeschauwer, Sergio Kurlat, and Romain Wacziarg.

omparative politics scholars have long considered electoral politics in Africa to be systematically and inherently clintelist. African rulers, whether self-appointed or democratically elected, rely on the distribution of personal favors to selected members of the electorate in exchange for ongoing political support.1 This observation relies on the implicit assumption that African voters invariably have a much stronger preference for private transfers than for public goods or projects of national interest. This article reports on the use of experimental methods to test several hypotheses pertaining to electoral clientelism in Benin in order to investigate the determinants of the voters’ demand for public goods . . . 
Leonard antchekon

While many analysts decry the lack of sufficient investment in Africa, we find no evidence that private and public investment are productive, either in Africa as a whole (unless Botswana is included in the sample), or in the manufacturing sector in Tanzania. In this restricted sense, inadequate investment is not the major obstacle to African economic development . . . 

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was formally implemented on 1 January 1994 by the United States, Canada, and Mexico. This treaty instantly gained global notoriety following the initiation of formal negotiations in 1991, not only because the initiative represented one of the most comprehensive trade agreements in history, but also because it seemed to be a breakthrough in establishing free trade in goods and services among developed and developing countries . . .