Browsing by Subject "Foreign aid"
Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
- Results Per Page
- Sort Options
Item Aiding dependency : a cross-national analysis of foreign aid and tax compliance(2016-08) Marineau, Josiah Franklin; Findley, Michael G., 1976-; Chapman, Terrence; Hunter, Wendy; Weaver, Catherine; McDonald, PatrickThis dissertation investigates whether foreign aid helps or hinders the development of state capacity through its influence on tax compliance. The dissertation argues that tax compliance is the product of a bargaining process between the state and citizenry, which aid can disrupt by lowering the incentive for states to collect taxes and the incentive for people to pay them. To test this argument, a new dataset of sub-national foreign aid in Uganda is used to show that aid lowers tax compliance. These findings are supported with data gathered during fieldwork in Uganda in April and May 2015, and then the findings are generalized through a cross-national analysis of the relationship between aid and tax compliance.Item Analyzing the motivations of U.S. development aid to Africa(2013-05) Akram Malik, Izzah; Weaver, Catherine, 1971-Research literature on foreign assistance suggests that the U.S. provides aid in order to serve both its own strategic interests as well as the development needs of aid recipient countries. Maintaining a focus on Africa, this report uses newly available data for official development assistance and attempts to verify whether prevailing hypotheses regarding the motivations behind U.S. aid giving still hold true. Specifically, the report analyzes whether aid giving patterns align with 1) the development needs of recipient countries as understood through the lens of internationally established priorities, or 2) with good political and economic policies within recipient countries vis-à-vis democratic institutions and open markets, or 3) with U.S. national strategic interests (be they political, military, or economic interests). A statistical analysis of U.S. Official Development Assistance (ODA) to 53 countries in Africa over the period of 1970 to 2010 was carried out for this purpose. The results suggest that, when it comes to aid that is specifically addressed towards development projects in Africa, the strategic considerations and political priorities of the U.S. are just as important, if not more important, than the development needs or economic performance of recipient countries. Political allies and countries that democratize receive more aid from the U.S., ceteris paribus. In addition, it was found that more aid is given to countries with larger populations - a result that contradicts earlier literature on aid's motivations. The report is organized as follows. I begin in Section 1 by providing a general overview of U.S. foreign aid. In Section 2, I detail why Africa is a significant continent for such an analysis of U.S. aid, and outline some of the trends in aid to Africa. The third section summarizes some of the most important existing hypotheses about why the U.S. gives development aid. Section 4 describes the data and methodology used for this study and provides a discussion of the results obtained from the statistical analysis. Finally, in Section 6, I conclude by offering broader policy implications and sketching out avenues for future research.Item The changing climate of vulnerability, aid and governance in Malawi(2012-05) Malcomb, Dylan Wayne; Crews, Kelley A.; Young, Kenneth R.; Miller, Jennifer A.By year 2020, developed countries pledged to mobilize USD100 billion per year towards mitigation of greenhouse gases and strategies of adaptation. This redistribution from Annex I (developed) countries to developing countries represents a near doubling of current official development assistance levels, yet future strategies of adaptation remain nebulous. Definitions, opinions and agendas of adaptation have evolved into new global development strategy, but will externally-designed strategies threaten an adaptive process that should be community-led and environmentally-contextual? Little empirical research has been conducted on adaptation as an international development strategy that consists of massive earmarking of funds to institute and later demonstrate that projects are related to climate change. Through semi-structured interviews with international and development organizations, national and local governments, civil society and community focus groups, this research chronicles Malawi's polycentric response to climate change vulnerability. Using site-visits to numerous active adaptation projects in Malawi as case-studies, this research examines who the stakeholders are in this process, what adaptation looks like and how the overall concept of this new development strategy can be improved.Item Coercive and catalytic strategies for promoting human rights : state violence and the composition of foreign aid(2023-04-17) Corwin, Hillary Genevieve; Jensen, Nathan M. (Nathan Michael), 1975-; Chapman, Terrence L.; McDonald, Patrick; Findley, Michael; Bunte, JonasThere is tremendous variation in whether and how donors respond to severe human rights violations using foreign aid. Donors that respond choose between two strategic options: coercion, which uses aid and the threat of withdrawal as material leverage to influence recipient leaders' behaviors, and catalysis, which uses aid for developing political systems in the recipient country to limit state violence from within. Once a donor decides to respond, what determines its strategic choices? I argue that three factors help to answer this question: (1) how exposed the donor's interests are to problems stemming from human rights violations, (2) how costly each strategy would be to the donor, and (3) whether the recipient is willing to pay the costs of pursuing outside options to obtain development finance. I use Tobit models to estimate how donor interests moderate the relationship between state violence and aid to economic and governance sectors from all OECD donors to all eligible recipients from 2003-2018. I find that donors typically prioritize catalytic strategies during this time period, but substitute coercive strategies when political liberalization would be difficult to achieve or undesirable from the donor's perspective. To estimate how donors respond to recipients' outside options for development finance, I use doubly robust difference-in-differences estimator with multiple treatments to investigate how recipients signing Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) agreements with China affect donors' strategy. I find that when recipients signal that they are willing and able to bypass OECD donors' coercive punishments, these donors further increase their reliance on catalytic strategies for promoting human rights. This has implications for understanding the relationship between human rights and foreign aid. Donors do not consistently rely on political conditionalities as leverage over leaders' policy decisions and typically attempt to strengthen and liberalize the domestic political environment for human rights in recipient states. When this is too costly for donors, they rely on coercive strategies. However, coercive strategy is under threat. Developing countries have access to a wider range of funding sources than in past decades, allowing them to access development finance without political conditionalities. Donors respond to these outside options by increasing their reliance on catalytic strategy, suggesting that donors are pursuing political liberalization in increasingly difficult environments.Item Constructing notions of development : an analysis of the experiences of Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers and the Peace Corps in Latin America and their interaction with indigenous communities in Ecuadorian Highlands(2013-08) Kawachi, Kumiko; Wade, Maria de Fátima, 1948-; Roberts, Bryan R., 1939-Post-development theorist, Arturo Escobar's influential work, Encountering Development as well as other post-development academic works discussed the concept and delivery of "development" based on known antecedents--Western countries as practitioners and non-Western countries as beneficiaries. Even though cultural sensibility has become a significant issue in development today, there is little research that analyzes the construction of non-Western donors' discourse such as those of the Japanese governmental aid agency, Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers. Moreover, non-Western aid donors and practitioners' engagement with indigenous development in Latin America has not been discussed. This dissertation aims to answer the following questions: How do Western and non-Western governmental donor agencies construct and deliver 'development' to 'non-developed' countries in Latin America, particularly to countries with large indigenous populations? How do these donor agencies' volunteer practitioners implement development projects in the field? What are the differences in the aims and delivery of development projects between Western and non-Western donors and their volunteer practitioners, especially in those projects aimed at indigenous populations? A corollary to those questions was to attempt to discover how the agencies and their volunteers negotiated notions of development with indigenous peoples as well as how agencies and volunteers perceived and addressed ethnic differences in the aid recipients' countries. To answer these questions I compared and contrasted two governmental agencies that are the most prominent and with the longest record of volunteer aid in Latin America: the United States Peace Corps and the Japanese agency, Japan Overseas Cooperation Volunteers (JOCV). Although the U.S. Peace Corps and its notion of development were models of "development" for the JOCV program, JOCV's discourse of development and its development practices are not the same as the Peace Corps. Both agencies' cross-cultural policies for their volunteers as well as the development practices the agencies adopted likely reflect how the Japanese and United States understand their own societies in general cultural terms, as well as in terms of moral and religious preferences, ethnicity and sexual orientation. The Peace Corps and JOCV volunteers' experiences with indigenous populations showed several limitations to their programs and provided suggestions for the future particularly in the area of indigenous development.Item Doing good or looking good? : communicating development, branding nation in South Korea(2019-02-12) Lee, Kyung Sun, Ph. D.; Wilkins, Karin Gwinn, 1962-; Strover, Sharon; Straubhaar, Joseph; Oppenheim, Robert; Pamment, JamesThis dissertation examines foreign aid-related activities of South Korea to demonstrate how the discourse and practice surrounding development is understood, interpreted, and enacted by an emerging donor. The past two decades have given rise to a diversity of development actors committed to doing good for their inter/transnational counterparts, evidenced in the multi-directional flow of development programs and funds to support such causes. Emerging from the multi-polar structure of the development landscape are a diverse range of articulations, motivations, and understandings guiding development aid. This has raised fundamental questions about how to approach and understand the geopolitical field of development at present moment in time, and the possibility of emerging actors to dismantle the dominant discourse of development. The scholarly field of development communication, however, has been slow to take such shifts into consideration. Following a critical approach to development communication, this study understands development as a discursive field where negotiation and struggle among different actors take place at multiple levels. Based on the theoretical understanding, this study examines South Korea’s development thinking and practice, specifically, in relation to its international development volunteer program. Drawing on a discourse analysis of multiple sources data, including news coverage that examines how development is discussed over time by Korean popular press, visual images of Korea’s volunteer program, and interviews with former volunteers, this study makes three points. First, geopolitical and domestic conditions over time have closely tied the understanding of development with nation building, where the two projects mutually constitute one another. Second, in examining how such enduring association of development with the national project is manifested in its representational practices of volunteer encounters, I show that the host becomes simplified, depoliticized, and romanticized, against which Korea is foregrounded as culturally rich, competent, and compassionate. Finally, drawing on an interrogation of multiple structural conditions that are implicated in development volunteering, I show the ways in which Korean volunteers navigate and complicate the dominant imaginaries of development, bringing new perspectives to nation, race, and gender in volunteer-host relationship.Item Foreign aid and the effectiveness of international counter-terrorism conventions(2014-08) Pascoe, Henry Baker; Jessee, Stephen A., 1980-In the contemporary international system, non-state actors pose an acute threat to the interests of states. Transnational terrorism is a particularly notable example of the security threats that non-state actors pose. While the literature on international agreements has focused on state-level compliance, much of international law concerns the behavior of non-state entities such as terrorist groups, transnational crime organizations, corporations, and individuals. This study considers whether the international counter-terrorism regime developed over the past five decades has been effective at reducing transnational terrorism and consider the implications for the study of other instruments of international law which regard non-state actor behavior. Because these agreements establish clear benchmarks, they provide observable outcomes for donors that may want to give foreign aid, but are uncertain about whether aid recipients will use aid for its intended purpose. Agreements allow donors to condition aid allocation on benchmarks set by treaties, rather than observed levels of non-state behavior alone, increasing donor-recipient trust and capacity building aid flows. I find that countries ratifying counter-terrorism agreements see a significant increase in foreign aid receipts. I then assess the effectiveness of eight UN counter-terrorism conventions individually, using terrorism data germane to the type of terrorist activity the specific agreement attempts to curtail. I find support for the hypothesis that counter-terrorism agreements reduce transnational terrorism for five of the agreements in issue areas of terrorist bombing, kidnapping, hostage-taking, and financing. I conclude by discussing how the variation in effectiveness of counter-terrorism agreements found may help shed light on the design of effective international agreements when the locus of compliance is non-state actors and treaty design more generally.Item Machina ex deos. Successes and challenges of implementing mobile computing technologies for development. The experience of nine Indian village health projects using a project-issued mobile application(2016-05) Schwartz, Ariel, Ph. D.; Weaver, Catherine, 1971-; Densmore, Melissa; Heinrich, Carolyn; Lentz, Erin; Ward, PeterAs mobile computing technologies become increasingly functional and affordable, global donor and local development organizations find ways to justify and fund their use in grassroots development work. This dissertation asks two questions: (1) In resource-constrained social sector settings, what project features govern and structure use of work-issued mobile devices? And: (2) How do decision-makers adjust to maximize the benefit of newly-introduced devices while minimizing new burdens to the project and project staff? More simply, what variables under social sector projects’ control might promote successful use of information and communication technologies in development (ICTD) projects? This research represents systematic, qualitative comparison of nine extended deployments of a popular mobile health application, CommCare. Each studied project deployed devices loaded with CommCare to health workers in India as a supportive job aid and/or a data collection tool to help monitor beneficiary populations’ health status and frontline workers’ work. This dissertation examines the conditions under which these health workers were able and willing to use CommCare devices in their jobs, and whether and how they deviated from the use of those devices prescribed by their supervisors. Primary data for this study come from 62 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, extensive review of project documents, and personal observations from field study in India over six months in 2013. Employing a sociotechnical lens and a principal agent model, my data support expectations that use of CommCare devices would help align community health workers’ behavior with their supervisors’ organization and mission-related priorities. Use of the devices improved health workers’ professional competence and improved communications, data quality, and data access. These improvements facilitated project supervisors’ monitoring of health workers and beneficiaries, and funders’ monitoring of projects. Contradicting expectations, use of CommCare devices also weakened organizational oversight and control through new data challenges and increased health worker autonomy in their personal and professional lives. These dual benefits and challenges ultimately served the overall projects’ missions.Item News, nations, and power relations : a study of newsmaking and policymaking as transnational practices(2017-08) Shahin, Syed Saif; Reese, Stephen D.; Bock, Mary A.; Johnson, Thomas J.; Sparrow, Bartholomew H.; Straubhaar, Joseph D.In this dissertation, I examine the relationship between newsmaking and policymaking as interpretive practices that operate by making sense of the social world based on stocks of knowledge about the nation and its stature and role vis-à-vis other nations. To do so, I study the news coverage of “foreign aid” from four nations – the United States, Britain, India, and Pakistan – over a 15-year period (2001-15). I also examine foreign policymaking in the form of speeches delivered by the leaders of these nations over the same period at the United Nations General Assembly. While machine learning helps me conduct a broad exploration of my large-volume data, critical discourse analysis aided by natural language processing leads to a rich, contextually sensitive understanding of the data based on purposive samples. The analysis illustrates a mutually constitutive relationship between newsmaking and foreign policymaking in all four nations. Both the news media and the political elite in each of these nations draw upon similar conceptions of national identity, respectively. In addition, these conceptions are complementary and transnationally shared. Journalists and policymakers everywhere rely on the same discourses of neoliberalism as the natural economic order and unipolarity as the functional political order of international relations: featuring the United States as the global superpower that enforces a capitalist free trade regime, Britain as a secondary power that helps the U.S. maintain this regime, India as an emerging power that aspires to a secondary position of power similar to Britain’s, and Pakistan as a subordinate nation that values itself as an ally of the superpower. I thus show how nations become willing participants in their own subordination. I also argue that voluntary subordination takes place because newsmaking and policymaking reify nations as the basic building blocks of social reality – thus according ontological equivalence and agency to all the peoples of the world qua nations. Subordinate nations, in particular, value this illusory sense of equality and agency, but it paradoxically makes them complicit in maintaining a hegemonic international order that curtails their choices and leaves them open to exploitation.Item The power of democratic stock : recent democracy protests on foreign aid disbursements(2021-05-06) Sanderson, Mackenzie Elizabeth; Fabregas, RaissaThis paper focuses on democracy protests in developing countries and how they affect total and USAID foreign aid disbursements. I hypothesize that democratic donor countries decrease foreign aid to recipient countries after a democracy protest because the democracy protests signal that the country is politically unstable and experiencing democratic backsliding. However, opposed to my original hypotheses, the findings in this paper lend evidence to support the idea that a democracy protest is associated with an increase in foreign aid disbursements. For total foreign aid disbursements, these increases occur in the first two years after a democracy protest. USAID disbursements increase three to five years after a democracy protest, but this increase is dependent on the level of democratic stock in the recipient country. This signals that donors may have varying motivations when a democracy protest occurs. For some, stability, no matter the domestic politics of the recipient country motivates an increase in disbursements. For other countries, like the United States, democracy promotion remains at the center of foreign aid decisions.Item United Nations conventions for the supression of transnational terrorism and international security cooperation(2016-08) Pascoe, Henry Baker; Chapman, Terrence L.; Wagner, R. Harrison (Robert Harrison),; Chaudoin, Stephen; McDonald, Pat; Fndley, Michael; Wolford, ScottTransnational terrorism transcends international boundaries, making interstate cooperation important for its prevention. However, high sovereignty costs and preference heterogeneity between targets of and havens for terrorism make counterterrorism cooperation difficult to achieve. In this dissertation, I investigate whether and how the United Nations conventions for the suppression of transnational terrorism, which have neither formal enforcement provisions nor delegated authority, are successful in fostering international counterterrorism cooperation. Using a game-theoretic model, I argue that multilateral agreements operate via an informal, decentralized, enforcement mechanism -- foreign aid. Agreements improve the ability of donors of foreign aid to monitor counterterrorism efforts of aid recipients, which makes threats to withdraw aid more credible. I test implications of using data on treaty ratification, foreign aid, the survival of terrorist groups, and transnational attacks. I find empirical support for two key implications of the model. Ratification: 1) increases receipts of foreign aid, 2) makes aid more effective at reducing transnational attacks, and 3) makes aid a more effective tool for destabilizing terrorist groups. This dissertation contributes to the study of informal enforcement mechanisms in international institutions and illustrates the importance of international institutions for facilitating cooperation for counterterrorism. In conclusion, I discuss the implications of this project for the literature on international institutions as vehicles of information transmission and the relationship between capacity building and enforcement in international institutions.