Explore
For Enterprise
Join for Free
Log In

Arts et humanités
Business
Informatique
Science des données
Technologies de l'information
santé
Mathématiques et logique
Développement personnel
Sciences physiques et ingénierie
Sciences sociales
Apprentissage des langues
Diplômes
Certificats

Explorez l'intégralité de Coursera

Parcourir
Rechercher
For Enterprise
Connexion
Inscrivez-vous gratuitement

Who Gives Foreign Aid, to Whom, and Why

Loading...

Political Economy of Institutions and Development

Université de Leyde

4.7 (164 notes) | 13K étudiants inscrits

This course is part of the SDG initiative <http://www.sdginitiative.org/> addressing the UN Sustainable Development Goals, specifically for the following SDGs [1, 8, 10 and 16]. We hope you will join in our efforts to reach the SDG’s in small but measurable and actionable ways, cooperating with Development Done Differently. Expand your impact. You can create a better world. In today’s world, politics and economics are interconnected, but what is the nature of this connectivity? What are the power relationships that shape the world economy today and create new challenges for international institutions facing globalization? What makes some countries wealthier than others? Do we face cultural diversity or fragmentation? Does the type of governance effect economic development and social change or is it the other way around? How do we measure it and how trustworthy is the data? These issues and many more will be examined in this course along with a wide library of sources and a biting criticism.

Visualiser le programme de cours

Avis

4.7 (164 notes)

5 stars
125 ratings
4 stars
33 ratings
3 stars
5 ratings
2 stars
1 ratings

IO

Sep 05, 2018

This course was very interesting and useful to the understanding of the social and economic systems and the global development process.

JR

Dec 12, 2017

The course is good although, definitely need to be update because the information provided in it is out of date.

À partir de la leçon

Economic Development

Development Assistance. Assesses the motivations for development assistance but raises doubts about the extent to which it can overcome local issues.

State Failure7:26

Who Gives Foreign Aid, to Whom, and Why6:24

The Real Aid Givers7:20

Aid Effectiveness6:49

Enseigné par

Richard Thomas Griffiths
Prof. dr.

Transcription

Hi there.

In the last video, we saw how in the 1990s state failure emerged as

a policy concern and we looked at two attempts to measure it.

In this video, we're going to examine the question, who gives aid to whom and why?

This was the title of an article published by Alberto Alesina and

David Dollar back in 2000.

Back then, I liked the title so much that we used it as the title of a conference on

the history of foreign aid that we held right here in Leiden.

And we'll concentrate our analysis on official development aid.

Official aid is aid given by governments,

doesn't cover aid donated directly from citizens.

And development aid is quite distinct from humanitarian aid,

which is directed at famine relief and refugee assistance.

Now, Alesina and Dollar took the aid data covering the period from the early 70s to

the early 1990s.

And compared the direction of aid flows with several other variables.

These included trade openness, democracy, civil liberties,

colonial status, foreign direct investment.

Per capita income at the start of the period, voting patterns in the UN,

and the position in the Middle East.

There are some criticisms we could make of the variables, themselves.

Some of them were crude, and others are suspect.

And if you really want to take your GDP PPP estimate seriously in 1970,

then you have to note that the price comparisons in that year were based

on a grand total of only ten countries.

So what did they discover?

Well, the results were heavily influenced by the fact that three-quarters of the aid

is from just five countries, the United States, Japan, France, Germany and the UK.

What Alesina and Dollar tried to do was to see how far the aid flows divulged from

expected distribution.

They suggested that being open and democratic were good.

If you are open, it would result in 20% more aid.

And being democratic, would increase your aid flow by almost 40%.

More important still was to have a long colonial past,

this increased the aid flow by 87%.

In fact,

being a non-democratic colony received more aid than the democratic non-colony.

The same held true for openness.

Countries voting in the United Nations

with Japan received a massive 172% more aid.

Interestingly enough, voting with the USA made no particular difference.

But this was because the American aid flow was dominated by its

involvement in the Middle East.

If you were Egypt, you receive 480% boost in your aid flow.

And being Israel was best of all, you received over 400 times the expected aid.

On the basis of this analysis, Alesina and Dollar concluded that one reason why aid

didn't seem to work was because aid flows would determine more by political and

strategic considerations than with the promotion of political and

economic reforms.

Now that was all over a decade ago, and

then the period still shaped overwhelmingly by the Cold War.

There've been two recent articles published in 2011 and 2014 that follow

the same question posed in the original Alesina and Dollar article.

They've extended the period covered,

and they've expanded the number of variables investigated.

So how has the passage of time effected the conditioning of aid flows?

Well, aid now does seem to flow more to the poorer countries.

Countries with better human right record also get better rewarded,

but not equally so.

The flow of aid tends to follow trade flows, and

the voting in the pact of the United Nations.

And this suggest that the donor self-interest is still an important

consideration.

And finally, and this comes from the earlier analysis.

Aid flows disproportionately to countries already receiving aid from other donors.

There's a sort of darling effect, being able to attract aid

helps reinforce the confidence of other donors in giving it.

Now the most recent article published in, well,

development in 2014 earlier this year.

Focuses on changes in the conditions and

perceptions in the donor countries rather than the situation in the recipients.

What do they say?

Well they suggests that as the donor countries themselves became richer, so

the radar relative to their GDP tends to increase.

They also found that aid patterns once established, tended not to alter much.

And they explain this by a mixture of bureaucratic inertia, and the medium term

nature of many of the projects, also a desire to be seen as a stable partner.

Now this study rejected any darling effect.

In fact, they suggested the opposite, namely that when one

country was committed, the others tended to steer clear.

Now this disagreement could be the result of a better coordination of aid efforts in

the more recent period, as well as possibly some methodological differences.

They found no support for a former colony effect, but

again, this could be because the variables were radically different.

And finally, and interestingly,

they found no relationship whatever with the war on terror.

Okay, let's sum up now, we've looked at the recent literature on aid allocation.

All of these studies,

you stand the techniques of multivariate regression analysis, so

we've got no weird self-constructed embassies to contain with.

Nevertheless, we have suggested some of the raw data is weak.

So although the insights are interesting, they should be treated with caution.

But there remains one big problem.

The analysis is determined by the size of the aid flows, and therefore,

effectively by the behavior of the big five donors.

And their motivation is imputed from their perceived behavior.

But while the big five are large aid givers, they're not generous aid givers.

None of them gets close to the 0.7% of GDP aid target established by

the United Nations.

So in the next video, we're going to concentrate on the four countries that

did reach that target, in the 1970s and early 1980s.

And which, since then, have never fallen below it.

Explorer notre catalogue

Rejoignez-nous gratuitement et obtenez des recommendations, des mises à jour et des offres personnalisées.

Coursera propose un accès universel à la meilleure formation au monde, en partenariat avec des universités et des organisations du plus haut niveau, pour proposer des cours en ligne.

© 2019 Coursera Inc. Tous droits réservés.

Télécharger dans l'App Store

Disponible sur Google Play

Coursera
À propos
Direction
Carrières
Catalogue
Certificats
Certificats MasterTrack™
Diplômes
For Enterprise
For Government

Communauté
Learners
Partners
Developers
Beta Testers
Translators

Se connecter
Blog
Facebook
LinkedIn
Twitter
Instagram
YouTube
Blog Tech

Plus
Conditions
Confidentialité
Aide
Accessibilité
Presse
Contact
Répertoire
Filiales