The Geography of Foreign Aid and Violent Armed Conflict

Abstract

Existing foreign aid databases – the OECD’s CRS data and now AidData – are project-based. And yet nearly all empirical analyses using these data aggregate to the country-year level, thereby losing project specific information. In this paper, we introduce new data on the geographic location of aid projects that have been committed to most African countries undergoing violent armed conflict between 1989 and 2008. To demonstrate the utility of the new data, we discuss how disaggregated aid and conflict data are needed to capture the theoretical mechanisms in the aid-conflict literature. We then map the disaggregated aid and conflict data in Sierra Leone, Angola, and Mozambique to demonstrate that the new data can help disentangle competing causal mechanisms linking aid to conflict onset and dynamics. The research provides an important new perspective on the connections between aid and conflict. More generally, it is a crucial first step in georeferencing and comparing foreign aid projects to various localized development outcomes.