312 research outputs found
Distortions in aid allocation of United Nations flash appeals: Evidence from the 2015 Nepal earthquake
No full textWe examine the role of local need and various distortions in the design and implementation of United Nations flash appeal triggered in response to the destructive 2015 Nepal earthquake. Specifically, we investigate the extent to which the allocation of this humanitarian assistance follows municipalities' affectedness and their physical and socio-economic vulnerabilities, as rapidly reducing suffering is the intended goal of flash appeals. We then analyze potential ethnic, religious, and political distortions. We alternatively consider the proposed project number, the proposed financial amount, and the subsequent funding decision by aid donors. Our results show that aid allocation is associated with geophysical estimates of the disaster's destructiveness, but shows little regard for the specific socio-economic and physical vulnerabilities conditional on destruction. It is worrisome that the allocation of the flash appeal commitments favors municipalities dominated by higher castes and disadvantages those with a greater distance to the Nepali capital Kathmandu
Geopolitics, Aid, and Growth: The Impact of UN Security Council Membership on the Effectiveness of Aid
No full text
Distortions in Aid Allocation of United Nations Flash Appeals: Evidence From the 2015 Nepal Earthquake
No full textSupplemental Material - Does India Use Development Finance to Compete With China? A Subnational Analysis
No full textSupplemental Material for Does India Use Development Finance to Compete With China? A Subnational Analysis by Gerda Asmus-Bluhm, Vera Z. Eichenauer, Andreas Fuchs, and Bradley Parks in Journal of Conflict Resolution</p
Supplemental Material - Does India Use Development Finance to Compete With China? A Subnational Analysis
No full textSupplemental Material for Does India Use Development Finance to Compete With China? A Subnational Analysis by Gerda Asmus-Bluhm, Vera Z. Eichenauer, Andreas Fuchs, and Bradley Parks in Journal of Conflict Resolution</p
Does India Use Development Finance to Compete With China? A Subnational Analysis
No full textChina and India increasingly provide aid and credit to developing countries. This article explores whether India uses these financial instruments to compete for geopolitical and commercial influence with China. We build a new geocoded dataset of Indian government-financed projects in the Global South between 2007 and 2014 and combine it with data on Chinese government-financed projects. Our regression results for 2,333 provinces within 123 countries demonstrate that India’s Exim Bank is significantly more likely to locate a project in a given jurisdiction if China provided government financing there in the previous year. Since this effect is more pronounced in countries where India is more popular relative to China and where both lenders have a similar export structure, we interpret this as evidence of India competing with China. By contrast, we do not find evidence that China uses official aid or credit to compete with India through co-located projects.Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft https://doi.org/10.13039/50110000165
What determines earmarked funding to international development organizations? Evidence from the new multi-bi aid data
No full textEarmarked aid to international development organizations has quadrupled over the last two decades and now represents almost twenty percent of total aid. This paper introduces a new dataset on earmarked aid, which alternatively has been referred to as multi-bi, restricted, non-core or trust fund aid. The data makes it possible to track the rise of the new aid channel over an extended period of time and in greater detail regarding, e.g., the implementing multilateral organizations. The data include more than 100,000 earmarked projects of 23 OECD donors to 290 multilateral institutions from 1990 to 2012. We graphically illustrate the distribution and patterns of this new aid channel for all actors involved, namely donor governments and their aid-providing agencies, multilateral organizations, and recipient countries, and highlight promising avenues for further research. In a first empirical application of the data, we analyze donors’ heterogeneous use of earmarked aid, and test three lines of argument for the provision of earmarked aid: official donor motives regarding specific recipient needs, public opinion in donor countries, and ‘market-oriented’ donor economies’ use of earmarked aid to ‘bypass’ recipient countries with weak governance. We show that earmarked aid is associated with different donor- and recipient-level factors than traditional or ‘pure’ bilateral aid
The Political Economy of Foreign Aid: Allocation, Timing, and Effectivenes
No full textThis thesis consists of four essays on the political economy of foreign aid. These essays cover issues related to the allocation, the timing, and the economic consequences of foreign aid for recipient countries. Chapters 1 and 3 consider the allocation of official development assistance across different aid channels (bilateral, multi-bi/trust funds, or multilateral). Chapter 2 studies the sub-annual timing of aid contributions to World Bank funds. Chapter 4 examines the growth consequences of short-term politically motivated foreign aid
The politics of special purpose trust funds
No full textOver the last decades, bilateral donors of foreign aid have increased their use of special purpose trust funds to provide earmarked aid to multilateral organizations. This paper investigates the incentives and consequences underlying this recent shift towards country- or theme-specific funding and away from bilateral and multilateral aid. We propose a game-theoretic model with multiple principals and a multilateral agent to study how the interaction between donor preferences, voter concerns in the donor country, the voting rules at the multilateral organization and the presence of special purpose trust funds influences aid allocation. We show that multilateral organizations with majority rules are more likely to receive discretion and thus voluntary core contributions than those with unanimity requirements and that the possibility of earmarking multilateral aid decreases donors' contributions to the multilateral's discretionary core budget and the amount of bilateral aid. In contrast to much of the literature dealing with issues of delegation and bi- and multilateral aid, our model suggests non-monotonic effects of preference heterogeneity on the choice of aid channel for some parameter combinations when contributions to special purpose trust funds are an option
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