The Political Economy of Multilateral Aid Funds

Axel Dreher, Jenny Simon and Justin Valasek ()

No 13297, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: When allocating foreign aid, donor countries face a problem of incentivizing recipient countries to invest in state capacity. Here, we show that donors can incentivize recipient countries by committing to collective decision-making: If aid allocation decisions are made ex post via bargaining between donors, then the negotiated outcome will be skewed towards aggregate efficiency, which induces the recipients to compete over ex ante investments. Our model links the fund's composition of membership and its decision rules to participation, investment and allocation decisions. We also find that majority rule induces stronger competition between recipients, resulting in higher investments in state capacity. The qualitative predictions of our model are broadly consistent with empirical findings on multilateral aid. In particular, the model rationalizes our novel empirical finding that, relative to organizations that use a consensus rule, organizations that use majority are more responsive to changes in recipient-country quality.

Keywords: Aid allocation; Aid effectiveness; International organizations; Decision rules (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F35 H87 O19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP13297 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:13297

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP13297

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().