Reorienting Foreign Aid*

Author(s):  
Sarah Blodgett Bermeo

This chapter applies the theory of targeted development to foreign aid and analyzes bilateral aid allocation from 23 donors to 156 recipient for the period 1973–2012. The targeted development framework predicts that donors will use aid where it can most benefit themselves by decreasing negative spillovers from underdevelopment, and that this concern with spillovers will have grown as globalization has increased. The analysis shows that in the post-2001 period, donors give more aid to nearby countries and to those that are linked to themselves through trade, migration, or historical ties. These countries have an increased likelihood of transmitting spillovers to the donor state. This marks a change from the Cold War period, when non-development considerations were leading determinants of aid policy. The analysis also shows that donors alter the composition of aid based on the quality of governance in a recipient, consistent with an attempt to increase aid effectiveness.

Author(s):  
Simone Dietrich ◽  
Matthew S. Winters

This chapter reviews empirical literature on foreign aid and QoG. The chapter begins with a description of how scholarship on foreign aid and QoG developed in conjunction with prominent debates in the development community. The chapter discusses three major debates: whether or not QoG moderates foreign aid effectiveness, whether or not donors give aid selectively based on QoG, and whether or not foreign aid undermines or can help build QoG. With regard to aid effectiveness, the most recent literature suggests that aid can be effective even under conditions of poor QoG. With regard to selectivity, the existing literature shows an increasing selectivity for overall aid flows since the end of the Cold War and provides evidence of selectivity in terms of type of aid. The evidence that aid undermines QoG is not as strong as has been claimed by some of the initial studies in this literature. The chapter concludes by suggesting ways forward for all three literatures.


2005 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fumitaka Furuoka

AbstractThis paper examines a new trend in Japan's Official Development Assistance (ODA) policy that emerged at the end of the Cold War. In 1992, the Japanese government adopted the "Official Development Assistance Charter," which obliged Japan to use its foreign aid to promote human rights, democracy, and freedom. Since the beginning of the 1990s, there have been cases when Japan imposed "human rights conditionalities" by increasing the amount of foreign aid to the recipient countries with good human rights records and reducing economic assistance to the countries with poor human rights practices. However, there remain doubts whether Japan is truly committed to use its aid power as leverage to ensure that democracy and human rights are respected by the governments of its aid recipients. This paper uses panel data analysis to examine whether the condition of human rights in aid-recipient countries has become one of the factors that influence Japan's ODA allocation. The findings reveal the lack of evidence to prove that the human rights condition in aid-recipient countries has influenced the allocation of Japanese aid.


2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75
Author(s):  
Jisun Yi

Why are donor goverments eager to increase foreign aid and how do they justify aid increase? This essay present a historical insight into the bilateral donors' rhetoric behind aid expansion. south korea provides one critical case. Not with standing its imperssive aid growth over the last decade, the country has constantly failed to meet its annual commitment by a significant margin. This article argues that such policy behaviour might stem from its legacy as a 'reactive state.' During the cold War, the country's nascent aid policy regime produced expansionary but non-strategic rhetoric, due to its fragmented structure and lack of indigenenous policy rationales. such traits of the policy regime linger today, thereby continuously favouring overstimated aid targets ana outwardlooking aid initiatives.


Asian Survey ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 38 (11) ◽  
pp. 1051-1066 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven W. Hook ◽  
Guang Zhang

2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 180-197
Author(s):  
Bokyeong Park ◽  
Hongshik Lee

This study investigates Korea's motivations for foreign aid allocation, analyzing panel data from over 180 countries for the last 20 years. The results show that Korea's aid allocation reflects both recipient needs and Korea's own national interests but does not consistently consider aid effectiveness. Korean aid is also characterized by its use as an instrument of both summit diplomacy and resource security. In addition, its commercial motivations appear to have shifted over time, from export promotion to overseas investment support. Despite internal and external pressures, there is no obvious evidence that Korea's allocation rule converges with international guidelines that recommend greater consideration of recipient needs and aid effectiveness and less consideration of donor interests.


Author(s):  
N.V. Varghese

With the end of the Cold War political returns on foreign aid diminished.Many countries came to recognise trade as a more development-friendlymodality than aid. Internationalisation of higher education also shiftedfrom aid related cooperation agreements to market mediated cross-bordertrade arrangements within the framework of the General Agreementon Trade in Services (GATS). This article examines the changing face ofinternationalisation of higher education with a focus on the Indian experience.It argues that while internationalisation and cross-border mobilityare mediated by market processes and economic rationality in most countries,the Indian government’s initiatives to internationalise Indian highereducation are motivated by extending diplomatic relations to enable thecountry to play a more prominent role in global affairs.


2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ivica Petrikova

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute to existing literature by examining whether development aid has any measurable impact on food security, whether the impact is conditioned on the quality of governance and whether it differs based on the type of aid provided. Design/methodology/approach – Panel-data analysis of 85 developing countries between 1994 and 2011, using generalized method of moments and two-stage least squares estimators. Findings – The paper finds that aid in general has a small positive impact on food security; that multilateral aid, grants and social and economic aid have a positive effect on food security in their own right, and that bilateral aid, loans and agricultural aid are more conditioned on the quality of governance that other aid. Research limitations/implications – The main limitations rest with the imperfect nature of cross-country data on food security and governance, which I have tried to overcome through a series of robustness tests. Practical implications – The findings suggest that aid, despite its many deficiencies, can play a positive role in strengthening food security. Furthermore, they indicate that concessional loans, bilateral aid and agricultural aid are likely to foster food security only in countries with better governance. Originality/value – The paper constitutes a novel contribution to existing literature because it is one of the first to use cross-country data to explore the impact of aid on food security and because it utilizes a relatively complex aid categorization, which allows its conclusions to be more nuanced.


Asian Survey ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 38 (11) ◽  
pp. 1051-1066 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven W. Hook ◽  
Guang Zhang

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 52-79
Author(s):  
Surinder Mohan ◽  
J. Susanna Lobo

This article traces the impact of superpowers’ foreign aid on India and Pakistan during the early decades of the Cold War. It shows how the American policy-makers have drawn their initial strategies to bring India under the Western fold and later, when the Indian leadership resisted by adopting the foreign policy non-alignment, charted a new approach to keep it at an adequate distance from the Soviet influence—particularly by exploiting its food insecurity and inability to complete the five-year plans. In contrast, the Soviet Union extended project-aid to India which assisted it to build much required large industrial base and attain self-sufficiency in the long run. By adhering to the non-aligned doctrine, India not only managed a negotiable balance with the superpower politics but also extracted considerable benefits for its overall development. On the other hand, aligned Pakistan had shown least enthusiasm with regard to self-sufficiency and pursued policies imbued with militarism which ended up it as a rent-seeking dependent state.


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