Bilateral foreign aid: how important is aid effectiveness to people for choosing countries to support?

ABSTRACT

We conduct a discrete choice experiment to determine how important aid effectiveness is to people relative to other criteria for choosing countries to support with bilateral foreign aid. We find that aid effectiveness is important, on a par with recipient-country need as proxied by the level of hunger and malnutrition. Both criteria are more important than others.

KEYWORDS:

• Foreign aid
• aid effectiveness
• discrete choice experiment
• conjoint analysis
• PAPRIKA method

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C90
• D64
• O10

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the people who participated in the discrete choice experiment. Funding from the Department of Economics, School of Business at the University of Otago is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ See Table 1 for the wording of the attributes and their levels.

² 1000Minds is available for unfunded research for free from the third author or via www.1000minds.com. Other recent DCE applications of PAPRIKA and 1000Minds include selecting plant species for ecosystem restoration (Graff and McIntyre 2014), marine policy-making (Chhun, Kahui, and Thorsnes 2015), prioritizing patients (White et al. 2015), plant (Smith and Fennessy 2014) and animal breeding (Martin-Collado et al. 2015) and retirement income policy-making (Au, Coleman & Sullivan, 2015).

³ For technical details, see Hansen and Ombler (2008).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the University of Otago.