An example from "The Bottom Billion"

Paul Collier's "The Bottom Billion" has drawn acclaim from several quarters. I found parts of the book, particularly later chapters strange, but the book very intersting. Here is Ethan Zucherman's review which is enthuastic with some reservations.
Chris Blattman in his post What to Read on Development says:
"Then there is Paul Collier's book. It offers, in my opinion, very confident conclusions based on still preliminary research and a partial reading of the literature. The book is very popular in the development agencies. If you know intimately the papers on which the conclusions are based, however, I think you can't help but be less sanguine. But to a non-expert, those challenges may not be obvious."

One of the problems with either aid or government garnts seems to be service delivery problems, particularly due to corruption in the bureaucracy. A chapter in William Easterley's The Whiteman's Burden is entitled 'The Rich Have Markets, the Poor Have Bureaucrats'. Some countries like Brazil have programmes like Bolsa familiato circumvent the bureaucracy. Here is a different type of strategy from 'The Bottom Billion' on page 150.
" The story begins with Ritva Reinikka devising a survey to survey public expenditure. She initially devised it for Uganda, where it came up with rather depressing results: only around 20 percent of the money that the Ministry of Finance released for primary schools, other than teachers' salaries, actually reached the schools. In some socities the government would have tried to suppress information like this, but in Uganda, far from suppressing it, Tumusiime-Mutebile used it as a springboard for action. Obviously, one way would have been to tighten the top-down system of audit and scrutiny, but they already been trying that and it evidently wasn't working well. So Tumusiime-Mutebile decided to try a comletely different approach: scrutiny from the bottom up. Each time the Ministry of Finance released money it informed the local media,and it also sent a poster to each school setting out what it should be getting.
... three years later he repeated the the tracking survey. Now instead of only 20 percent getting to schools, 90 percent was getting through."