Does foreign aid harm political institutions?

WIDER Working Paper 2015/094 Does foreign aid harm political institutions?

Foreign Aid, Political Instability, and Economic Growth

Relying on a simple endogenous growth model, this paper highlights a political instability effect as a potential explanation for why foreign aid is frequently ineffective with respect to economic performance. In the present framework, the role of the state is to fund institutions allowing for ongoing technology adoption and hence long-run growth. However, providing a self-interested government ...

Political Institutions and Foreign Debt in the Developing World

Why did some developing country governments accumulate large foreign debt burdens in the late twentieth century while others did not? I hypothesize that variation in foreign indebtedness is a product of the impact of regime type on government borrowing and investment decisions. Autocratic regimes will borrow more from foreign lenders and invest fewer of these funds in public goods than democrat...

Donors and domestic politics: Political influences on foreign aid effort

The vast majority of scholarship on foreign aid looks at either the effectiveness of foreign aid or why particular countries receive aid from particular donors. This paper takes a different approach: what are the domestic sources of support for foreign aid? Specifically, how does the donor’s domestic political and economic environment influence ‘aid effort’? This paper uses a time-series cross-...

The Political Economy of U.s. Foreign Aid: American Legislators and the Domestic Politics of Aid

Are there systematic political economy factors that shape preferences for foreign aid, a key component of American foreign policy? We analyze votes in the House of Representatives from 1979 to 2003 that would increase or decrease foreign aid by considering the political, economic, and ideological characteristics of legislators and their districts. To understand who supports and opposes foreign ...