Aid has frequently been provided for with non-economic objectives, such as emergency assistance following disaster relief, or for political or geostrategic reasons. During the Cold War, billions of dollars of aid supported corrupt and tyrannical dictators such as Joseph Mobutu of Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic. In other cases, aid may have had a negative effect on growth through ‘Dutch Disease’ effects - where inflows of capital reduce the competitiveness of the export sector through the appreciation of exchange rates. More generally, the cross-section ‘aid and growth’ literature is bedevilled by all the econometric problems associated with the ‘trade and growth’ literature, to which we referred earlier.