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Clarifying the Foreign Aid Puzzle: A Comparison of American, Japanese, French, and Swedish Aid Flows

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Peter J. Schraeder ,
Steven W. Hook  and
Bruce Taylor
Peter J. Schraeder
Affiliation:
Loyola University Chicago
Steven W. Hook
Affiliation:
Kent State University
Bruce Taylor
Affiliation:
Loyola University Chicago
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Abstract

This study explores the donor side of debates revolving around the proper role of foreign assistance as a foreign policy tool, by empirically testing for the aid determinants of four industrial democracies: France, Japan, Sweden, and the United States. A pooled cross-sectional time-series design is employed to assess the impacts of six sets of variables on aidflowsto thirty-six African states during the 1980s. Three sets of these variables—humanitarian need, strategic importance, and economic potential—are constructed using data traditionally employed in empirical foreign aid studies. Three additional sets of variables—cultural similarity, ideological stance, and region—are constructed from data that regional specialists consider to be important in the foreign aid equation. Although no two cases are alike, one can nevertheless draw some tentative conclusions about the nature of the foreign aid regime of the final cold war decade of the 1980s on the basis of several cross-national patterns. In short, the results (1) contradict rhetorical statements of northern policymakers who claim that foreign aid serves as an altruistic foreign policy tool designed to relieve humanitarian suffering; (2) confirm the expected importance of strategic and ideological factors in a foreign aid regime heavily influenced by the cold war; and (3) underscore the importance of economic, particularly trade, interests in northern aid calculations.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , January 1998 , pp. 294 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1998

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References

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29 In order to minimize the problems associated with utilizing cases of differing size in regression, all of the interval-level variables have been standardized to either GNP or population of recipient country (except for the trade variable, which has been standardized to total imports). This corrects for the heteroskedastic distribution of the raw data and decreases the importance of potentially influential cases.

30 The source of this data is the World Bank's World Development Report supplemented by the World Bank's World Tables of Economic and Social Indicators (1950–88), ICPSR Dataset 9300.

31 The source for military spending is the SIPRI Yearbook: World Armaments and Disarmament (various years), published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Military force data are from World Military Expenditures andArms Transfers, the annual report of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

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