Foreign aid funnel? A placebo-based assessment of aid flows to non-permanent United Nations Security Council members

Abstract

A number of recent studies have found that temporary members of the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) experience increased foreign aid inflows. We use a constrained permutations approach to replicate analyses found in Vreeland and Dreher (2014). Permuting the timing of country membership on the Security Council, we create placebo UNSC membership histories which plausibly could have been observed. We use these placebos to construct a reference distribution for the null hypothesis that there is no relationship between UNSC membership and foreign aid flows and then observe whether or not the observed test statistic for the correlation found in the real-world data is in the tails of this distribution. In other contexts, such empirically based hypothesis tests have revealed a high false-positive rate for traditional, model-based time-series cross-sectional inference. Given the controversial nature of studies about increased aid flows as secondary benefits of UNSC membership, it is valuable to subject such analyses to additional scrutiny. Our reanalysis largely validates existing findings.

Buying Votes and International Organizations: The Dirty Work-Hypothesis

“…Second, we qualify the 'UNSC effect.' Multiple recent studies have shown a relationship between temporary UNSC membership and favorable treatment from aid donors and multilateral organizations (Dreher, Sturm, and Vreeland 2009a;2009b;Kilby 2013b;Kuziemko and Werker 2006;Mikulaschek 2017b;Reynolds and Winters 2016;Vreeland and Dreher 2014). For the case of US aid and IMF loans we show that those temporary members of the UNSC that vote in line with the United States rather than membership itself drive this effect.…”

“…These studies includeDreher, Sturm, and Vreeland (2009a;2009b;;Kilby (2013);Mikulaschek (2017b); andReynolds and Winters (2016) Vreeland and Dreher (2014). use a preliminary version of the dataset that we introduce in this paper in some regressions.…”

Corrupting International Organizations

“…An increase in loans from the African Development Bank is found for UNSC membership only in the post-1982 period, when Western governments exerted direct influence over the institution's executive board. Reynolds & Winters (2016) methodologically innovate the study of the effects of elected UNSC membership by introducing a constrained permutations approach to generate placebo UNSC membership histories. The approach reduces the chances of producing false-positive results (see Reynolds & Winters 2016, pp.…”