Accueil
Summary : Who gives foreign aid to whom and why? The main argument of this article is whether the foreign aid to developing countries are efficiently or inefficiently used and if there is a regular pattern in aid flow and the political circumstances have an significant effect on the results we are obtaining. Many economic and political measures such as ‘democratic - non democratic’, ‘economically closed’, ‘former colony’, ‘level of poverty’ etc. are tested to extract more plausible explanations in the relationship between donors and recipients and to discover the interests of donors.
The study on foreign aid is divided into two kinds. One is to study the effects of foreign aid on the receiving countries, the other is to investigate what are the determinants of foreign aid. Many research works were introduced to help comprehensions, to give ideas about the determinants of aid and the different consequences made as time changes.
According to the data provided by OECD (1970-1994; divided in different time series), aid flow relates to the variables; Trade openness, democray, civil liberties, colonial status, direct foreign investment, religion, initial income, population. The influence of colonial past is also a great factor in aid flow and the correlation between recipient and donor found if they have friendly relationship between Japan, UK or France.
Integrating all these variables obtained from data, a model regression is produced and it showed a strong significance in explaining the aid flow. However, several exceptional cases were found which could not be explained by the regression. Israel is the case. It received a massive aid from donor countries even though it had no experience of colonization and its economic level was much higher than many other recipient countries. The huge aid received from USA was by its political interest. Those results suggest that the political and strategic considerations should be taken into account in explaining aid flow. Further investigation achieved on democratization reward system and if it really fosters the “open” policies of recipient country. As a result, a significant increase in aid was found. Aid increased steadily as recipient country develops into more democratic form.
In conclusion, the limited performance of the bureaucracies of receiving countries and the pattern of the flows of foreign aid were considered as the cause of inefficaciousness of aid at promoting growth and poverty reduction. The three big donors, USA, Japan and France all showed different distortion in choosing recipient countries. U.S gives most of aid to Egypt and Israel, France to former colonial countries and Japan’s aid is correlated very much with UN voting patterns. However, many indicators were studied to provide the explanation of the aid flow and the correlation between donor and recipients country, such as ‘openness’, ‘democracy’, ‘income’, etc. We found that there is very strong correlation between the level of democracy and the amount of aid given to a recipient country. Executive summary : development aid and gender inequality Topic of the article we’ve read could range over number of social and economical issues. What decides development aid and what matters does it depends on? That’s what this article basically questions. However, our group came out with an idea that the gender inequality could be a plausible indicator to predict the foreign development aid (FDA). We thought that donor countries give more aid to those with higher gender inequalities so they can fight against. Afghanistan is a good example as well as it is the country which receives the most aid in the world and in fact, it has strong gender inequality. However, we assume also that some countries do not want to donate to the regimes which encourage the gender discriminations. Muslim brotherhood in Egypt is a good example.
In order to prove whether inequality between gender have influence on decision of aid or not, we have to compare FDA with indicators of gender inequality. First we compare the FDA to the percentage of girls in primary school, which measures the gender inequality in education. Secondly, FDA compared to the percentage of women in working population to know about the gender inequality in labour market. Other variables like population and GDP was added to increase the accuracy of model.
In conclusion, and after hard work of testing the quality of our study and avoiding the common mistakes, all we can say is that there is no relation between the amount of given aid and gender inequality, neither on education nor in labour market. These disappointing result were somewhat expected, because there exists many other reasons of giving foreign aid than just gender inequalities, such as poverty or starvation.
Regarding to the study, we discovered that more rich the country is, the less it receives foreign development aid. We can also say that the bigger a population is, the less it receives aid per capita. We can explain this because no matter how many people have a country, it counts one voice in the United Nations’s General Assembly. So, rich countries want to influence small countries by giving large amounts of aid per capita, which represents small amounts of aid in total.
