No Poverty Zero Hunger Good Health Well-being and Quality Education - these are the first
priorities of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that were launched jointly by all UN
Member States on January 1 2016. The agenda of this agreement contains 17 main goals with a
total of 169 targets and is dedicated to improving global living conditions and to address
issues of environmental and economical sustainability with a planning horizon through to 2030.
Development assistance from economically advanced countries also referred to as aid is one of
the major means to provide financing for countries with less developed economies that face
severe social problems and which often cannot handle these problems alone. Previous studies
have shown however that aid is ineffective and recommend comprehensive restructuring of the
common aid practices. Investigations that analyse the pattern of aid flows find moreover that
granting aid to certain recipient countries cannot only be explained by altruistic motives.
They show that several strategic or non-strategic reasons have a high explanatory power for
individual donor aid allocation. Against this background the present study explores aid
effectiveness of distinct bilateral donors. This is achieved by a large-scale panel data
analysis applying per-capita economic growth infant mortality and primary growth as indicators
for measuring the contribution of aid to achieving the different SDGs.
