Three Essays on the Political Economy of Foreign Aid Practices in the Development Assistance Committee Countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation is a collection of essays on the political economy of foreign aid in the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) countries. Chapter 1 provides an overview of the foreign aid literature, focusing on the practice of aid tying and foreign aid's impact on political support between aid donor and recipient countries. Chapter 2 investigates the hypothesis that institutional factors such as fragmentation of the executive power and the position of government vis-a-vis legislative composition within the governments of DAC countries help explain why levels of tied aid remain significantly above zero despite the push in the development community to untie all bilateral foreign aid. The results show as the executive power becomes more fragmented, particularly as the number of spending ministers and the number of political parties in the governing coalition increases, countries increase the level of tied aid. Chapter 3 empirically tests whether the DAC countries use aid disbursements to exert political influence over aid recipients by influencing how the recipients vote in the United Nations General Assembly. In general, the results show a positive relationship between voting coincidence and foreign aid distribution for Canada, France, Spain, and the United Kingdom while no conclusive link was established for the United States. These results may be considered a lower bound of political influence because of the possibility of free riding among the DAC countries. Chapter 4 extends the work in the previous chapter by disaggregating the aid data to account for the heterogeneity of aid and the possibility that the different categories and forms of aid may differ in their ability to induce political support. The analysis shows, among other things, that in the post Cold War era disaggregated aid measures do not show a robust influence on voting coincidence for most of the DAC countries. These results in chapters 3 and 4 may differ because recipients may value total aid more than individual aid categories because of the fungibility of aid. Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation by summarizing the key findings and offering extensions to the current research.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".