Evaluating explanations for poverty selectivity in foreign aid
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 h...
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Published in | Kyklos (Basel) Vol. 75; no. 1; pp. 30 - 47 |
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Main Authors | , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Bern
Blackwell Publishing Ltd
01.02.2022
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Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
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Summary: | 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. |
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Bibliography: | editor, Faisal Ahmed, David Bearce, Mwita Chacha, Marina Magaldi, Carla Martinez Machain, Elena McLean, Cliff Morgan, Tim Peterson, Liana Reyes‐Reardon, Alastair Smith, Harvey Starr, and Spencer Willardson as well as from participants at presentations at Rice University, the Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas (CIDE), Nazarbayev University, University College London, the University of Houston, the University of Mannheim, the 2016 International Studies Association Annual Convention, and 2016 Midwest Annual Convention. Leah Long provided research assistance. Replication files are provided in the supplementary material Kyklos www.theinrich.net/research We are thankful for useful feedback and suggestions from the referees, the and at . |
ISSN: | 0023-5962 1467-6435 |
DOI: | 10.1111/kykl.12284 |