Annotated Bibliography Assignment

Your assignment is to:

1. Write a paragraph or so outlining the topic of your proposed empirical research paper in economics. Try to carefully and concisely specify what you intend to study.

2. Put together an annotated bibliography on your topic. Sources should be appropriately cited and there should be an informative annotation for each. The length of annotations may differ across sources, but should not exceed a paragraph for any given source.

For the first draft you should have at least five sources, appropriately cited, with annotations. For the second draft you should have more sources. The second draft should be more accurate, complete, and informative than draft 1.

The works cited and annotated should be from credible, informed sources

Annotated Bibliography

I am planning to research how corruption and foreign aid affect the growth of countries in Africa. I expect that more corruption in a country's government slows the growth rates and more economic aid results in faster growth rates. A model that accurately explains the relationships could show where foreign aid is most effective at bringing countries out of poverty. I was able to find a large data set including amount of aid received and growth rates, but not nearly as much time series data on corruption perception data. Therefore I think two models would be more appropriate. The first simply comparing only aid and growth using the large data set and a second model that adds corruption values but shrinks the other data set. I don't think an average corruption value can be used over the entire data set because the level of corruption obviously changes over time and, if a significant variable, each year's growth would be affected by a different level of corruption. I am not sure if I am going to define "growth" as GDP growth, GNI growth, or something else. Both can work as indicators of a growing or shrinking economy, so I will probably end up using the one that has the most data available, unless further research shows that one is a better representation than the other.

Sources:

Alesina, Alberto and Weder, Beatrice. "Do Corrupt Governments Receive Less Froeign Aid?" The American Economic Review. Vol. 92, Sep. 2002, pp 1126-1137.

This paper uses many different corruption indexes to conclude that there is no significant relationship between corruption in a government and the total amount of aid it receives. It found that aid coming from Scandinavian countries went mostly to non-corrupt governments and aid from the U.S. went to democratic nations (but not necessarily corruption-free nations). This finding could be verified in my paper by seeing if there is a correlation between aid and corruption variables.

Brautigam Deborah and Knack Stephen. "Foreign Aid, Institutions, and Governance in Sub-Saharan Africa." The University of Chicago 2004.

This paper came up with a nice model whose dependent variable is the ICRG quality-of-governance index and incorporated a lot of data that I may be meaningful in my model like population change, the presence of political violence, and aid.

Dalgaard, Carl-Johan, Henrik Hansen, and Finn Tarp. "On the Empirics of Foreign Aid and Growth." The Economic Journal 114 (June) 2004.

This paper looks at the theoretical incentives of foreign aid as well as an empirical analysis. Very similar to what I will be doing so an important source to read in order to understand the many aspects of foreign aid and its (dis)incentives.

Easterly, William. "Can Foreign Aid Save Africa?" December 2005.

This relies more on theory and review of literature rather than original empirical research. This will help me get acquainted with current ideas and opinions.

Transparency International.

This site provides a Corruption Perceptions Index and may be one of the many indexes used in my paper. It has data going back to 1998 so I may want to find if there are any indexes that have more years of information.

World Development Indicators 2006. The World Bank Group.

This is my primary source of information on foreign aid and growth of GDP and GNI. It contains data going back to 1961 for almost every country in Africa. It makes a distinction between countries north and south of the Sahara. Countries north of the Sahara are grouped with the Middle East countries, so that may be significant in my model as cultural differences play an important part of an economy

Empirical Research Question Assignment

According to Creswell, "Quantitative research questions inquire about the relationships among variables that the investigator seeks to know."

Creswell gives the following example as a script for a quantitative research question:

"Does _________ (name the theory) explain the relationship between ________ (independent variable) and _________ (dependent variable), controlling for the effects of _______ (control variables)?"

Examples of research questions in general include the following:

Can changes in diet and upbringingcompensate for genetic abnormalities?

Why is there little pretend play among young children in many societies, andwhat difference does this make in laterdevelopment?

What causes some children to be bullies?

Your assignment is to write a quantitative research question related to economics that could be addressed in a one semester project using multiple regression techniques. In addition to a clear statement of your research question, include a couple sentences explaining why your question is interesting and important. What you submit should be no more than a single paragraph in length.

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