1,721,392 research outputs found
Muyang Chen. 2024. The Latecomer’s Rise: Policy Banks and the Globalization of China’s Development Finance. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press)
No full textSovereign Funds: How the Communist Party of China Finances Its Global Ambitions Zongyuan Zoe Liu. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2023. 276 pp. €40.95; £37.95 (hbk). ISBN 9780674271913
No full textDistortions 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
Paying a visit: The Dalai Lama effect on international trade
No full textIs political compliance a precondition for healthy trade relations with China? The Chinese government frequently threatens that meetings between its trading partners' officials and the Dalai Lama will be met with animosity and ultimately harm trade ties. We run a gravity model of exports to China from 159 partner countries between 1991 and 2008 to test the extent to which bilateral tensions affect trade with autocratic China. In particular, we empirically investigate whether countries that receive the Dalai Lama despite China's opposition experience a significant reduction in their exports to China. In order to account for the potential endogeneity of meetings with the Dalai Lama, the number of Tibet Support Groups and the travel pattern of the Tibetan leader are used as instruments. Our empirical results support the idea that countries officially receiving the Dalai Lama at the highest political level are punished through a reduction of their exports to China. However, this 'Dalai Lama Effect' is only observed for the Hu Jintao era and not for earlier periods. Furthermore, we find that this effect is mainly driven by reduced exports of machinery and transport equipment and that it disappears in the second year after a meeting took place. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
Democracy and Aid Donorship
No full textAlmost half of the world\’s states provide bilateral development assistance. While previous research takes the set of donor countries as exogenous, this article introduces a new dataset on aid giving that covers all countries in the world, both rich and poor, and explores the determinants of aid donorship. It argues and shows empirically that democratic institutions support the setup of an aid program in richer countries but undermine its establishment in poorer countries. The findings hold in instrumental-variable regressions and the pattern is similar for the amount of aid. (JEL D72, F35, H87, O17, O19)Almost half of the world’s states provide bilateral development assistance. While previous research takes the set of donor countries as exogenous, this article introduces a new dataset on aid giving that covers all countries in the world, both rich and poor, and explores the determinants of aid donorship. It argues and shows empirically that democratic institutions support the setup of an aid program in richer countries but undermine its establishment in poorer countries. The findings hold in instrumental-variable regressions and the pattern is similar for the amount of aid. (JEL D72, F35, H87, O17, O19
Does private aid follow the flag? An empirical analysis of humanitarian assistance
No full textThis paper compares the allocation of private humanitarian aid to that of official humanitarian aid awarded to 140 recipient countries over the 2000–2016 period. We construct a new database that offers information on the country in which the headquarters of private donors are located to test whether private aid tends to follow the humanitarian aid allocation pattern of the respective official donor. Our empirical results confirm that private humanitarian aid tends to “follow the flag”. This finding is robust against the inclusion of various fixed effects, estimating instrumental variables models and disaggregating private humanitarian aid into corporate aid and NGO aid. Donor country-specific estimations reveal that private humanitarian aid from China, Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States tend to “follow the flag”
The effects of foreign aid on refugee flows
No full textWe investigate whether foreign aid affects refugee flows from recipient countries. Combining refugee data on 141 origin countries over the 1976–2013 period with bilateral Official Development Assistance data, we estimate the causal effects of a country’s aid receipts on both total refugee flows to the world and flows to donor countries. The interaction of donor-government fractionalization and a recipient country’s probability of receiving aid provides a powerful and excludable instrumental variable (IV) when we control for country- and time-fixed effects that capture the levels of the interacted variables. Though our IV results suggest that aid induces recipient governments to encourage the return of their citizens, we find no evidence that aid reduces worldwide refugee outflows or flows to donor countries in the short term. However, we observe long-run effects after four three-year periods, which appear to be driven by lagged positive effects of aid on growth
- …
