What is foreign aid?

• Foreign aid has been a foreign policy tool for millennia.
• Modern practice rooted in the Marshall Plan of 1948.
• Now a widespread practice and expectation.
• In 2020 DAC countries spent over $30 billion on Official Development Assistance.
• Countries are only spending more over time.
• New countries want in on the action:
  • China
  • Iran
  • Saudi Arabia
  • …

Why is aid given?

Selfish

Selfless

Why is aid given?

• Question: Is aid selfish or selfless?
• Easy Answer: It depends 😕
• Better Answer: We can look at patterns in international aid to see when and where donors are selfish or selfless 🤔

Follow the money!

Where to start?

• Selfish Motives:
  • Foreign policy interests
  • “Donor interest”
• Examples:
  • Strategic interests (military alliances)
  • Material interests (promoting trade)
  • Geographic interests (maintaining a sphere of influence)
  • Social interests (influence over former colonies)

Where to start?

• Selfless Motives:
  • Humanitarianism/altruism
  • “Recipient need”
• Examples:
  • Poverty (GDP/capita)
  • Conflict (ongoing civil war)
  • Natural disasters (year disaster deaths)
  • Impact (population size)

What patterns we expect to see

Let’s take a stab at it!

Access here!

Questions

1. Which donor (Japan or the Netherlands) and year did you look at?
2. Did their pattern of giving look selfish, selfless, or like a combination?
3. Was it easy or difficult to evaluate motives?
4. In one sentence, indicate something that excited you or concerned you about this process.

What we learned

• We could look at how aid giving correlates with all these and even more factors.
• This is the conventional approach to studying international aid.
• Some studies use more than 30 different variables to test why donors give aid!
• Talk about information overload!
• A recipe for: 😕, 😨, 😢

A new way to answer an old question

A new way to answer an old question

A new way to answer an old question

A new way to answer an old question

A new way to answer an old question

A new way to answer an old question

• This makes examining patterns in international aid much easier.
• It makes communicating these patterns to an audience much easier, too!
• Let’s consider a simple set of comparisons…
  • Japan vs. the Netherlands

Is Japan selfish and the Netherlands selfless?

Now it’s your turn!

Check it out here!

Questions

1. Which donor and year did you look at?
2. Did their pattern of giving look selfish, selfless, or a combination?
3. Was it easier or harder to evaluate motives?
4. In one sentence, indicate something that excited you or concerned you about this process.

A new way to answer an old question

• Life is easier with two measures rather than too many.
• We can identify clear patterns in the data that before were lost in the weeds.
• These measures are not perfect (none are!).
• But it’s time for something new…
• …The old way of studying international aid doesn’t cut it.

Work this research has supported

• Strategic responses in aid giving
• Lead donorship

Strategic responses in aid giving

Strategic responses in aid giving

Strategic responses in aid giving

Compete

Pass the Buck

Strategic responses in aid givng

Lead donorship

Conclusion

• “Are donors selfish or selfless?” is an old question in international aid.
• The conventional approach to answering this question has tended to create more confusion than clarity.
• I’ve taken a new approach to addressing this question by combining many old measures into a smaller number of new ones.
• This lets me examine patterns in international aid with greater clarity.
• And makes it easier to communicate these patterns to others.
• Finding ways to simplify, rather than complicate, data analysis is important in telling stories with data and for tackling important questions in society and work politics.