The Effects of Multilateral vs. Bilateral Aid on Recipient Behavioral Support

The literature on foreign assistance generally holds that multilateral aid is preferable to bilateral aid, but establishes this primarily through highly aggregated cross‐national time‐ series data. We investigate this topic experimentally from the perspective of those whom the foreign aid directly affects: recipient citizens. We thus report results of a survey exper‐ iment with behavioral outcomes on more than 3,000 Ugandan citizens. The findings pro‐ vide some evidence that multilateral aid is indeed preferable to bilateral aid, but the effect obtains only for some of our outcomes of interest. We disaggregate the data and compare preferences within the multilateral and bilateral categories and show evidence that aid from the U.S. government is preferred to aid from China for some outcomes.