Aid-growth nexus: empirical evidence from Fiji

Abstract

Foreign aid to the island economies is a major source for foreign exchange and resource needs. This paper presents an empirical analysis of the relationship between foreign aid and economic growth in the case of Fiji. A neoclassical production function is applied to estimate the aid-growth nexus. Since the data employed are time series for the period 1968 to 1996, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag approach to cointegration is utilized to estimate the models. Components of total aid, such as grant aid, loan aid, technical cooperation, bilateral and multilateral aid flows are also utilized to estimate a disaggregated short-run and long-run relationship between foreign aid and economic growth. The results show that total aid flows and its various forms, i.e. bilateral aid, grant aid and technical cooperation grant aid, has a significant impact on economic growth in Fiji. As for domestic resources, only exports and private investments in two equations show positive contribution to growth.