Aid for trade initiative 16 years on: lessons learnt from the empirical literature and recommendations for future directions

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to present a review of empirical evidence on the effectiveness of Aid for Trade (AfT) inflows and recommend new areas of interest concerning the initiative other than its effect on trade performance. Design/methodology/approach This paper reviews a sample of 55 studies over the past 11 years. Besides, this paper categorised the reviewed empirical studies into three groups: the works concentrating on the trade performance effect; the works focusing on other economic factors effect; and the works concerning the allocation effect of these inflows. This paper also offers a detailed analysis of the multiple empirical methods, sources of data, coverage of the countries and forms of AfT inflows used in the reviewed literature. Findings Key findings indicated that AfT has overall produced a successful impact as reported by most studies. Moreover, it has been highlighted that the effectiveness of AfT may differ relying on multiple indicators: the category of AfT disbursements; income of the recipient country; the recipient country's geographical region; the amount of aggregate AfT as well as its main categories; the policy regulation and institutional quality of the recipient country; and the degree of liberalisation in the recipient country. Originality/value This paper is special in that it is the first to publish a comprehensive narrative analysis of 55 empirical pieces of evidence on the effectiveness of AfT over the past 11 years. It is also the first paper to review the previous literature regarding the effectiveness of AfT inflows on other non-trade outcomes, as well as trade outcomes in one single study. The outcome of the survey reveals new areas of interest in the effectiveness of AfT aside from trade performance.