Strategic Samaritanism: how armed conflict affects aid receipts

ABSTRACT

How does armed conflict affect the flow of foreign aid? Aid scholars have frequently argued that assistance is given either to serve donor interests or meet recipient needs and evaluated their theories using a single measure of aid. In this project we introduce the concept of an aid portfolio comprised of different types of assistance that a conflict-affected country might receive: humanitarian, economic, and aid to support governance and the social sector. We expect these components of a recipient country’s aid portfolio to vary according to both its needs and its capacity to absorb them. We call this logic, which assumes donors are motivated in part by considerations of efficacy, ‘strategic Samaritanism.’ We also expect conflict-affected countries’ needs and capacity to vary in predictable ways, with states that are severely affected by violence in need of more aid but less able to absorb some types of assistance until the fighting is over. Meanwhile, countries heavily affected by refugee flows should both need and be able to absorb more of each type of aid. We test our argument on a dataset of aid flows and violent conflicts in developing countries from 1989–2009 and find considerable supporting evidence for our expectations.

¿Cómo afectan los conflictos armados al flujo de ayuda exterior? Los eruditos de la ayuda han argumentado con frecuencia que la ayuda se presta para servir a los intereses de los colaboradores o para satisfacer las necesidades de los receptores y han evaluado sus teorías utilizando una única medida de ayuda. En este proyecto introducimos el concepto de una carpeta de ayuda compuesta por los diferentes tipos de ayuda que puede recibir un país afectado por un conflicto: ayuda humanitaria, ayuda económica y ayuda a la gestión pública y al sector social. Esperamos que estos componentes de la carpeta de ayuda de un país receptor varíen en función de sus necesidades y de su capacidad para absorberlos. Llamamos a esta lógica, que supone que los colaboradores están motivados en parte por consideraciones de eficacia, “samaritanismo inteligente”. También esperamos que las necesidades y la capacidad de los países afectados por el conflicto varíen de forma previsible, ya que los estados que fueron afectados de manera grave por la violencia necesitan más ayuda, pero tienen menos capacidad para absorber algunos tipos de ayuda hasta que cesen los combates. Mientras tanto, los países más afectados por el flujo de refugiados deberían necesitar y ser capaces de absorber más de cada tipo de ayuda. Ponemos a prueba nuestro argumento con un conjunto de datos sobre los flujos de ayuda y los conflictos violentos en los países en vías de desarrollo entre 1989 y 2009, y encontramos considerables pruebas que respaldan nuestras expectativas.

Comment les conflits armés affectent-ils la circulation de l’aide étrangère ? Les chercheurs spécialisés en aide ont fréquemment soutenu que l’assistance était offerte soit pour servir les intérêts des donateurs, soit pour répondre aux besoins des destinataires. Ils évaluaient en outre leurs théories en s’appuyant sur une seule mesure d’aide. Dans ce projet, nous introduisons le concept de portefeuille d’aides comprenant différents types d’assistance dont un pays affecté par un conflit peut éventuellement bénéficier: de l’aide humanitaire, de l’aide économique et une aide visant à soutenir sa gouvernance et son secteur social. Nous nous attendons à ce que ces composantes du portefeuille d’aides d’un pays destinataire varient à la fois selon les besoins du pays et selon sa capacité à les absorber. Nous qualifions cette logique, qui suppose que les donateurs sont en partie motivés par des considérations d’efficacité, de « samaritanisme avisé ». Nous nous attendons également à ce que ces besoins et cette capacité des pays affectés par un conflit varient de manières prévisibles, les États gravement touchés par la violence ayant besoin de davantage d’aide mais étant moins capables d’absorber certains types d’assistance avant la fin des combats. Dans le même temps, les pays lourdement affectés par des flux de réfugiés risquent à la fois d’avoir besoin de davantage de chacun des types d’aide et d’être capables de les absorber. Nous avons mis notre argument à l’épreuve en nous basant sur un jeu de données portant sur les flux d’aide et les conflits violents qui sont intervenus dans les pays en développement entre 1989 et 2009, et nous avons découvert des preuves considérables étayant nos prévisions.

KEYWORDS:

• Foreign aid
• Civil War
• complex emergencies

Notes

¹ UN General Assembly, “2005 World Summit Outcome,” A/RES/60/1, https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/migration/generalassembly/docs/globalcompact/A_RES_60_1.pdf, p.30.

² Even aid targeted to address countries’ pressing needs can be given for either altruistic or political reasons. While meeting such needs may rarely advance narrow donor-specific interests, doing so is not necessarily altruistic and may instead reflect general donor incentives to limit instability and the spread of disease. Likewise, leaders in donor states may have political motives for responding to these needs, such as addressing domestic pressure to respond to foreign crises (see for instance Strömberg 2007).

³ We leave the examination of natural disasters to future research.

⁴ The concept of an aid portfolio comprising subcategories of aid rather than aggregating them together is usually applied to donors (Clemens et al. 2012; Finkel, Pérez-Liñán, and Seligson 2007).

⁵ See p. 23 of “The List of CRS Purpose Codes,” available at http://www.oecd.org/dac/stats/ purposecodessectorclassification.htm.

⁶ See e.g., Murdoch and Sandler (2002), p.91–92 and 96, on these specific mechanisms.

⁷ The World Bank classifications are available at databank.worldbank.org/data/download/site-content/OGHIST.xls, accessed 05/10/2017.

⁸ We use the Aggregate, Donor, Recipient, Year, Purpose name version of Release 2.1, accessed 07/16/2014. The data are available at http://aiddata.org/data/aiddata-research-release-2-1.

⁹ For social/governance assistance we use the 10000 purpose code, for economic the 20000 and 30000 purpose codes, and humanitarian the 70000 purpose code.

¹⁰ It is not uncommon that a complex emergency ends only to be followed shortly by another. When this happens, the post-conflict indicators from the previous complex emergency are set to zero.

¹¹ The results detailed below were similar when we alternatively used only battle deaths, data from UCDP’s Battle-Related Deaths Dataset (Uppsala Conflict Data Program [UCDP] 2014).

¹² Beginning in 2006, the FDP’s data on internally displaced persons (but not refugees) come from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center rather than USCRI.

¹³ These data come from the OECD’s Creditor Reporting System, accessed April 23, 2018.

¹⁴ The number of individuals affected by natural disasters is zero in these figures.

¹⁵ The results discussed but not shown in this section are available in the online Appendix.

¹⁶ Though a series of Hausman tests suggested that fixed effects models were preferred, a few indeterminate results led us to seek confirmation that our findings were not artifacts of the estimator.

¹⁷ Data for colonial history are from the ICOW Colonial History Dataset (Hensel 2014), while regional dummies were created using EUGene v3.212 (Bennett and Stam 2000).

¹⁸ Total terror attacks were measured as the natural log of the count of terror attacks in a country year from the Global Terrorism Database (START 2017). Large-scale violence against civilians is coded as an indicator that takes a value of one for any year in which the UCDP one-sided violence dataset (Eck and Hultman 2007) codes the government as killing more than 1,000 civilians.

¹⁹ Data obtained from the UNHCR at https://www.unhcr.org/refugee-statistics/download/?url=G5ps, accessed October 30, 2020.

²⁰ Data obtained from the OECD’s Creditor Reporting system, accessed October 26, 2020.