Foreign aid has been an area of active scholarly investigation since the end of the Second World War, but particularly since the early 1950s when a large number of the erstwhile colonies became independent. Few areas of public policy involving the developed and developing countries have aroused more passion and ideological debate than foreign aid. In spite of the massive amount of research in the field, there is still not enough work in two areas: the first involves the mechanisms through which aid influences the economies of the donor and the recipient countries; and the second, country-specific assessments of the effectiveness of foreign aid. Foreign Aid: