The Relationship Between Foreign Aid and Economic Growth: Empirical Evidence from Bangladesh

Abstract

Bangladesh’s growing foreign aid has sparked controversy over whether it affects the country’s economic performance. This review assesses foreign aid’s influence on the country’s economic growth with annual data covering the 1989–2018 period. The Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model is applied to achieve the research objective, and the empirical results indicate a substantial and robust impact of foreign assistance on economic growth. The outcome further reveal that domestic investment also contributes significantly to the country’s economic evolution. However, trade openness plays a substantial positive role in the short run, although the impact is immaterial in the long run. The empirical findings indicate that the association between aid, domestic investment, and growth has a confident meaningful effect at 1 per cent level in the long run, whereas aid influences more than domestic investment. However, in the short run, aid, domestic investment, trade openness, and growth show positive and noteworthy response also at 1 percent level. This review undertakes a detailed analysis about the country’s economic growth, and grounded on its outcome, this work suggests that focus should be placed more on creating domestic investment, promoting more export, and allocation of aid should be determined by the relative needs of the country.

Keywords: Foreign Aid, Domestic Investment, Trade Openness, Economic Growth, Bangladesh

JEL Classification: C22, F35, F43, O11