Pundits, development practitioners, and scholars worry that rising populism international disengagement in developed countries have negative consequences on foreign aid. However, how aid go together is not well understood. This paper provides the first systematic examination of this relationship. We adopt popular ideational definition populism, unpack into its core “thin” elements, examine them...

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 ...

Foreign aid has become a very important source of government revenue for many countries in the world. The academia and policy communities are interested in whether foreign aid has done what it is supposed to do. The aid literature has paid special attention to foreign aid’s effects, if any, on poverty reduction, economic growth, human capital accumulation, to name but a few. One often overlooke...

Existing research into the relationship between foreign aid and taxation in recipient countries has both conceptual and econometric failings. Empirical results based upon observed tax revenues conflate the effect of aid upon tax structures with the effect upon flows of taxable economic activity, most notably the level of imports. The use of variables normalized by GDP is also likely to generate...

To study whether foreign aid fuels personal, regional and ethnic favoritism, we use satellite data on nighttime light for any region in any aid-recipient country, and we determine for each year and each country the region in which the current political leader was born. Having a panel with 22,850 regions in 91 aid recipient countries with yearly observations from 1992 to 2005, we compare the eff...

The macroeconomic rationale for aid relates to its ability to supplement savings, foreign exchange and government revenue, thus contributing to growth. This processes presumes a simple Harrod-Domar context in which growth is driven by physical capital formation. However, the macroeconomic reality of aid is more complicated. Three areas of complication are discussed: (i) the effects of aid on fi...

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