Results from single-donor analyses of project aid success seem to generalize pretty well across donors
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Results from single-donor analyses of project aid success seem to generalize pretty well across donors Ryan C. Briggs1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Much research on foreign aid presents claims that apply to aid in general but tests these claims using data from one or a small number of donors. This makes it difficult to know if we have learned something about aid, or merely something about one donor. For example, the literature on project aid success has found that per capita GDP growth rates or Freedom House scores in recipient countries correlate with project success. However, these claims have been tested against data from only multilateral donors and often against data from only the World Bank. I re-examine these analyses using a dataset of harmonized project outcome scores for seven diverse donors. Most donors seem to be similarly influenced by recipient-level and projectlevel factors, though a few notable exceptions exist. Analyses of project aid success that focus on single donors may be able to produce knowledge about aid in general. Keywords Foreign aid JEL Classification F35 · O22
Many studies of foreign aid test general claims with narrow evidence. This is likely a function of limited data availability and is most acute when studies need data that
I’d like to thank Aart Kraay for comments on an earlier draft and Dan Honig for sharing data and for comments. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-019-09365-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. Ryan C. Briggs
[email protected] 1
Guelph Institute of Development Studies and Department of Political Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, Canada
R. C. Briggs
are more fine-grained than country-years flows.1 For example, most donors do not provide project-level information about their foreign aid. One notable exception to this is the World Bank (WB), which provides project-level information for its entire set of aid projects as well as outcome ratings and locations for many projects. Unsurprisingly, scholars have responded by testing their claims about aid using WB data. While this is understandable, it is unclear if the findings produced by such analyses generalize to aid from other donors. This comment seeks to understand if past research on aid project success generalizes to donors beyond the WB. It is reasonable to expect especially multilateral aid to be different from bilateral aid. Multilateral donors, for example, have institutional structures that encourage their aid to flow to areas where stakeholder interests overlap (Rodrik 1995). This arrangement seems to make their aid less (or perhaps differently) politicized than bilateral aid, which often closely tracks the political, economic, or military interests of donors.2 While there are good reasons to expect aid from multilateral donors to behave differently from bilateral aid, limited evidence suggests a high degree of similarity across donors in s
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