Explaining the Allocation of Bilateral and Multilateral Environmental Aid to Developing Countries

In this paper we examine how international development assistance for environmental purposes is allocated to developing countries. In particular, we investigate whether there are patterned differences between environmental aid for international public goods projects versus environmental projects having more localized impacts. We empirically investigate these questions using project project level development assistance data.International Development,

Brokering development policy change: the parallel pursuit of millennium challenge account resources and reform

A small body of mostly anecdotal evidence suggests that governments have undertaken legal, policy, institutional, and regulatory reforms to enhance their chances of becoming eligible for assistance from the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). But we know little about the strength and scope of the so-called "MCC Effect”—in particular, why it seems to exert varying levels of influence across time, space, and policy domains. I collect two novel sources of data on the MCC Effect in order to explain the conditions under which the MCC eligibility standards have influenced the reform efforts of developing country governments. Through formal coding of archival data, I construct a database of more than 14,000 country policy-domain-year observations that measures whether and how governments change their policy behavior in order to achieve or maintain MCC eligibility. I then employ logit, rare event logit, and three-level random intercept modeling techniques as well as propensity score matching methods to explain the policy responses and non-responses of governments to the MCC eligibility criteria. I also draw on data from a first-of-its-kind survey of 640 development policymakers and practitioners in 100 low income and lower-middle income countries to "ground truth" inferences drawn from analysis of the archival data. My findings suggest that a range of factors influence the probability that a government will pursue reform ctivities in response to the MCC eligibility criteria. However, the central contribution of this thesis is the theoretical and empirical argument that the network positions of change management teams shape whether, when, and how externally inspired reforms get adopted and implemented. In this regard, I call attention an underappreciated factor that shapes the adoption and implementation of externally-influenced reforms: the presence of a policymaking team that has sufficient autonomy to introduce disruptive changes to the status quo, but also sufficient embeddednesss to overcome domestic political opposition

German Aid from a Partner Perspective: Experience-based Perceptions from AidData's 2014 Reform Efforts Survey

Despite a large body of literature on foreign aid effectiveness and significant international policy debate on the same topic, there is little consensus about how best to measure and compare the policy influence of international development organizations. In 2014, a group of researchers from AidData at the College of William & Mary conducted a first of its kind survey, involving more than 6,500 development policymakers and practitioners across 126 low-income and middle-income countries. The 2014 Reform Efforts Survey asked in-country policymakers and practitioners to draw upon their firsthand experiences and observations to evaluate the influence of international development organizations across 23 different policy domains. This survey provides rich, micro-level data for researchers who wish to study nearly 100 international development organizations from a partner-country perspective. In this joint study, AidData and DEval make use of this rich source of data to test a number of hypotheses about the comparative strengths and weaknesses of Germany’s development cooperation, and to identify the factors that enable and constrain German development agencies in their efforts to influence the reform processes of partner countries

Beekeeping for Beginners

35 p

Aid on Demand: African Leaders and the Geography of China s Foreign Assistance

We investigate whether the political leaders of aid-receiving countries use foreign aid inflows to further their own political or personal interests. Aid allocation biased by leaders selfish interests arguably reduces the effectiveness of aid, negatively affecting development outcomes. We examine whether more Chinese aid is allocated to the political leaders birth regions and regions populated by the ethnic group to which the leader belongs, controlling for objective indicators of need. We have collected data on 117 African leaders birthplaces and ethnic groups and geocoded 1,955 Chinese development finance projects across 3,553 physical locations in Africa over the 2000-2012 period. The results from various fixed-effects regressions show that current political leaders birth regions receive substantially larger financial flows than other regions. We do not find evidence that leaders shift aid to regions populated by groups who share their ethnicity

Tracking Under-Reported Financial Flows: China’s Development Finance and the Aid-Conflict Nexus Revisited

China’s development finance is sizable but reliable information is scarce. To address critical information gaps, we introduce a new open source methodology for collecting project-level development finance information and create a database of Chinese official finance to Africa from 2000-2011. Our initial data collection efforts found that China’s official finance commitments amount to approximately US$ 73 billion over the 2000-2011 period. We provide details on 1,511 non-investment projects to 50 African countries. We use this database to extend previous research on the aid-conflict nexus. Our results show that sudden withdrawals of “traditional” aid are only more likely to induce conflict in the absence of sufficient alternative funding from China. More broadly, these findings highlight the importance of gathering better data on the development activities of China and other non-traditional donors to better understand the link between foreign aid and conflict

Are African leaders misusing Chinese development finance? The price of country ownership

In a 2012 blog post, MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and Harvard’s James Robinson call attention to a “fancy school” built in a small village in Sierra Leone and financed by Chinese development aid. They ask a pointed question: “Why would anyone want to build a wonderful school in the middle of what Africans call ‘the bush’?” As Acemoglu and Robinson explain, “Yoni is the home village of Sierra Leone’s president, Ernest Bai Koroma.

Ground-truthing' Chinese development finance in Africa: Field evidence from South Africa and Uganda

A new methodology, Tracking Under-Reported Financial Flows (TUFF), allows us to systematically gather open-source information - e.g. news reports, case studies, project inventories from embassy websites, and grant and loan data published by recipient governments - about Chinese development finance activities in Africa that can be updated and improved through crowd-sourcing. In this study we create and field-test a replicable 'ground-truthing' methodology following an established protocol to verify and update existing data with in-person interviews on Chinese development finance and site visits in Uganda and South Africa. Ground-truthing generally revealed close agreement between open-source data and answers to protocol questions from informants with official roles in the Chinese-funded project