Transition and Foreign Aid Policies in the Visegrád Countries: A Path Dependant Approach

Abstract

The paper argues that the current emerging international development policies of the Visegrád (V4) countries are heavily influenced by the certain aspects of the communist past and the transition process. Due to these influences, the V4 countries have difficulties in adapting the foreign aid practices of Western donors and this leads to the emergence of a unique Central and Eastern European development cooperation model. As an analytical background, the paper builds on the path dependency theory of transition. A certain degree of path dependence is clearly visible in V4 foreign aid policies, and the paper analyzes some aspects of this phenomenon: how these new emerging foreign aid donors select their partner countries, how much they spend on aid, how they formulate their aid delivery policies and institutions and what role the non state actors play. The main conclusions of the paper are that the legacies of the communist past have a clear influence and the V4 countries still have a long way to go in adapting their aid policies to international requirements.

Development Cooperation of the ‘New’ EU Member States

“…This is true for other countries of the region as well and therefore the following chapters give at least a glimpse of their pre-1990 activities. There is no doubt that the Eastern aid was, inter alia, ideologically motivated, since it was the Third World countries sympathizing with socialism that were chosen to be aid recipients (Szent-Iványi & Tétényi, 2008), but Western aid was not less determined by the Cold War (Boschini & Olofsgård, 2007). It is important to stress that, in spite of the labels that are also used in academia, most of the 'new' member states are not 'new' or 'emerging' donors, provided that we step out of the Western OECD aid framework that imposed itself as the dominant model after the end of the Cold War.…”

Aid allocation of the emerging Central and Eastern European donors

“…We must not however underestimate the importance of these policies. Hungary for example in the 1970's spent an average 0,7 percent of its national income on various forms of foreign aid, which is an extremely high level, even though the methodologies for calculating both national incomes and aid levels in the Eastern Block at the time do not permit comparisons with Western donors and current aid levels (HUN-IDA 2004;Szent-Iványi -Tétényi 2008). The opinion of Michaux (2002: 19) By the end of the decade an increasing, although rather implicit international pressure appeared towards the four countries to take a larger share in aiding poorer countries.…”

“…Even though some descriptive and even normative studies have been published in the past years (see for example Kiss 2007;Drozd 2007;Bucar and Mrak 2007;OECD 2007b;Szent-Iványi -Tétényi 2008;Lightfoot 2010), the scarcity of comparable data renders any such attempt almost impossible. These few existing studies do permit a fair amount of critical remarks concerning aid quality, but it must be kept in mind that we are dealing with emerging foreign aid policies, still in the phase of learning.…”

Capacities of African-oriented Polish NGOs: a quantitative approach

“…The literature concerning Polish development assistance is rich, though it is not diversified in terms of the range of topics. Since the accession of Poland to the European Union, foreign institutions, non-governmental organisations and individual scientists have been analysing the Polish development cooperation system mainly from the perspective of the Visegrad Group countries (Drążkiewicz-Grodzicka, 2013;Horký-Hlucháň & Lightfoot, 2013;Kopiński, 2012;Kudzko, 2014;Lightfoot & Szent-Ivanyi, 2014;Lightfoot & Zubizaretta, 2008;Szent-Ivanyi & Lightfoot, 2015;Szent-Ivanyi & Tetenyi, 2008) or a separate case (Wasilewska, 2006;Hinz & Hofmokl, 2013;Drążkiewicz-Grodzicka, 2013;Kochanowicz, 2013;Kugiel, 2016;Szymoniczek, 2016;OECD, 2017). These publications present a complete picture of the institutional development cooperation system during the post-socialist transformation.…”