Gesture Politics or Real Commitment? Gender Inequality and the Allocation of Aid

Abstract

We investigate whether donors give more aid to countries with larger gender gaps in education, health, or women's rights, and whether they reward improvements in those indicators. We find some evidence that high gender gaps in education and health are associated with higher allocation of aid in those sectors and aid overall. Greater female political representation also appears to come along with higher aid flows. While we find no systematic evidence that donors allocate funds with regard to merit, our results show that donors are more responsive to inequalities in countries that provide good legal rights for women. Ó 2014 Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/).

Gender inequality, female leadership, and aid allocation: A panel analysis of aid for education

“…However, Fuchs et al (2014) find that female representation has no robust impact on the donors' aid effort. Breuning (2005Breuning ( , 2006 as well as Dreher et al (2015b) are more closely related to our empirical analysis later on. Breuning (2005) compares the allocation of (total) aid by performing separate estimations for the Netherlands and Japan.…”

Do Development Minister Characteristics Affect Aid Giving?

“…While Dreher et al (2015a) find little evidence overall of a link between female representation in donor countries and a more gender-related need-or merit-based aid allocation, they show that female development ministers channel more aid to countries with low and unequal female tertiary enrolment, low and unequal female life expectancy, and with a higher share of women in parliament.…”

“…The existing papers that cover the role of development ministers only analyze the impact of the ministers' gender. Dreher et al (2015a) find that female development ministers are more responsive to gender issues when allocating aid than their male counterparts. Kleemann et al (2014) discover only minor gender differences in the allocation of aid for education.…”

“…15 Note that Kleemann et al (2014) and Dreher et al (2015a) do not control for the characteristics of the respective head of government, which may lead to spurious results as we outline below in greater detail.…”

Aid for Gender Equality and Development: Lessons and Challenges

“…She examines whether four large donors (France, Japan, the UK and the USA) account for gender equality (measured by the male-female literacy gap) when they allocate aid to African countries and finds that aid recipients with a higher gender literacy gap received a larger share of the overall aid these donors have given to Africa from 1993 to 2003. More recently, Dreher et al (2015) investigate whether overall aid commitments and aid to specific sectors are higher to countries where gender inequality is particularly severe, and whether and how donors respond to changes in gender gaps. Their analysis covers 1982-2011; indicators measure outcomes of women relative to men as well as levels of absolute outcomes for women in five domains: women's rights, life expectancy, education, employment and political participation.…”