Does Aid Buy Votes?
27 Pages Posted: 5 Feb 2012
Date Written: July 12, 2011
Abstract
We use data for 143 developing countries during the period 1980-2004 to study empirically the relationship between multilateral aid (as proxied by IDA flows) and support for US foreign policy, as measured by voting alignment at the United Nations General Assembly. Our identification strategy exploits exogenous variations in international commodity prices and natural disasters to address causality from aid to voting. Our results suggest that, even though multilateral and bilateral aid flows are both associated with greater voting alignment, the causal effect of multilateral aid is not significantly different from zero. This result is robust to controlling for other determinants of voting patterns, for unobserved heterogeneity at the country level and for common time trends.
Keywords: foreign aid, UN Assembly, voting, international financial institutions
JEL Classification: F35, O10
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation
Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?
Recommended Papers
-
By A. Craig Burnside and David Dollar
-
Aid, Policies, and Growth: Revisiting the Evidence
By A. Craig Burnside and David Dollar
-
Who Gives Foreign Aid to Whom and Why?
By Alberto F. Alesina and David Dollar
-
Aid Allocation and Poverty Reduction
By David Dollar and Paul Collier
-
Aid and Growth: What Does the Cross-Country Evidence Really Show?
-
Aid and Growth: What Does the Cross-Country Evidence Really Show?
-
New Data, New Doubts: Revisiting 'Aid, Policies, and Growth'
By William Easterly, Ross Levine, ...
-
New Data, New Doubts: A Comment on Burnside and Dollar's "Aid, Policies, and Growth" (2000)
By William Easterly, Ross Levine, ...