Evaluating explanations for poverty selectivity in foreign aid

Abstract

Ending global poverty has been at the forefront of the development agenda since the 1970s, but many donors have failed to target their funds toward this goal. Activists have tackled this issue by appealing to donors’ humanitarian motives, but we know little about what explains donors’ decisions on how much to give to the poorest countries. This paper develops the donor motivation and foreign policy approaches and identify donors’ development motives and their budget sizes as potential determinants of poverty selectivity. We evaluate their explanatory power by assessing whether their relationships with selectivity are in the hypothesized directions and generalize beyond a particular dataset. Employing cross‐validation and Bayesian Model Averaging, we find few measures of donor motivations provide a generalizable and hypothesized explanation for poverty selectivity. In contrast, donor budget sizes exhibit a relationship that is both hypothesized and externally valid. Our study offers the first systematic analysis of aid selectivity and generates implications for recent approaches to improve the quality of foreign aid and the conventional approach to study foreign aid allocation and donor motives.

Donor political preferences and the allocation of aid: Patterns in recipient type

“…Although some scholars successfully employ this dichotomous view of donor preferences and behavior (Adhikari 2019;Dietrich and Murdie 2017), our theoretical position has more in common with those who see all donors as strategically motivated. Foreign aid is a foreign policy tool (Heinrich 2020;Palmer, Ok, Wohlander, and Morgan 2002). We agree that meaningful recipient development and donor strategic interest are not diametrically opposed (Bermeo and Leblang 2015, Bermeo 2017, Cheng and Shahryar 2021, despite that presumption in aid-for-policy thinking (Bueno de Mesquita and Smith 2007).…”

“…Despite the intuitive appeal of the argument that government ideology predicts foreign aid allocations, studies do not consistently find leftist governments allocating more generous levels or more altruistic patterns of foreign aid compared to the stingier or more strategic programs of conservatives (Tingley 2010, Brech and Potrafke 2014, Dreher, Nunnenkamp and Schmaljohann 2015, Heinrich and Kobayashi 2020. Much of this confusion, we contend, stems from overlooking an equally important ideological determinant of attitudes towards foreign aid: the extent to which international affairs are viewed as a vital and important part of the government's role versus an expensive, elite distraction from the needs of the domestic population (Greene and Licht 2018).…”

The Missing Fingerprints: U.S. Women Legislators and International Development Aid

“…Prominently, many studies report fairly consistent, positive associations between women's seats shares in national legislatures and aid expenditures (Breuning 2001;Fuchs and Richert 2018;Hicks, Hicks, and Maldonado 2016;Lu and Breuning 2014;Okundaye and Breuning 2021;Yoon and Moon 2019; but see Fuchs, Dreher, and Nunnenkamp 2014;Lundsgaarde, Breunig, and Prakash 2007). 5 A similar association is found with higher aid quality, an important dimension of foreign aid that assesses how well a given amount of aid is targeted to serve those most in need (Heinrich and Kobayashi 2022;Hicks, Hicks, and Maldonado 2016). 6 Unfortunately, our understanding of the mechanisms that produce these associations is scant.…”

What motivates South Korean Official Development Assistance?

“…Moreover, the labels assigned to various variables such as humanitarian, economic, security, or political, oversimplify the complex foreign policy motives of actual countries. Importantly, there is a lack of compelling evidence that the set of variables ostensibly measuring donor motivations explain poverty selectivity (Heinrich & Kobayashi, 2021), thereby questioning the effectiveness of econometric approaches. On the other hand, descriptive accounts better capture the complexity of donor motivations, but these studies are typically not systematically linked to empirical evidence.…”