The Samaritan's Dilemma and the Effectiveness of Development Aid

Karl Pedersen ()

International Tax and Public Finance, 2001, vol. 8, issue 5, 693-703

Abstract: Contributing to the alleviation of poverty in recipient countries is one of the main goals of most aid organizations. In this paper the following question is asked: could it be the case that altruistic aid organizations are counter-productive in the sense that their activities may cause the extent of poverty to increase or the relative income distribution to worsen? The answer is yes and the reason is simply that recipient governments adjust in order to qualify for aid. It is shown that if recipient governments perceive themselves as being engaged in a competition for aid and/or if the aggregate aid budget is endogenous, then the incentive problems may become particularly severe. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2001

Keywords: aid; development; poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1012839126094 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:itaxpf:v:8:y:2001:i:5:p:693-703

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/10797/PS2

DOI: 10.1023/A:1012839126094

Access Statistics for this article

International Tax and Public Finance is currently edited by Ronald B. Davies and Kimberly Scharf

More articles in International Tax and Public Finance from Springer, International Institute of Public Finance Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().