With the continuous development of the international community's assistance to developingcountries, the evaluation of the effectiveness of aid on growth has always been a controversial topic. Scholarsat home and abroad have made in-depth research on this issue from the theoretical and empirical aspects andobtained a lot of results, but at present there is a lack of systematic analysis of this issue. Through collectingand sorting out relevant literatures, this paper first classifies the economic growth effect of foreign aid into threecategories and finds that foreign aid can indeed promote the economic growth of recipient countries. Secondly,this paper further sorted out the mechanism of how aid affecting the economic growth of recipient countries, andsummarized it into four routes: international trade, foreign direct investment, public expenditure and domesticconsumption. Finally, it is proposed that future research should focus on the heterogeneity of aid funds andinformation asymmetry between countries, compare the different mechanisms of aid affecting economic growth,expand the range of available data and pay attention to the impact of data processing on empirical results.