 Foreign assistance and emigration: Accounting for the role of non‐transferred aidMauro Lanati and Rainer Thiele The World Economy, 2020, vol. 43, issue 7, 1951-1976 Abstract: Since policymakers increasingly regard foreign aid as a means to manage international flows of migrants, it is important to obtain accurate empirical evidence on the complex link between aid and migration. Recent research has shown that the impact of foreign assistance on migrant flows is highly heterogeneous across aid categories. In this paper, we focus on a dimension of heterogeneity that has so far not been considered in the literature, namely whether or not the delivery of foreign aid is associated with a transfer of resources to the recipient country. We show in a first step that non‐transferred aid is quantitatively important, accounting for more than 25% of overall aid given by OECD DAC donors in 2016. Running separate gravity‐type regressions for transferred and non‐transferred aid, we then find that transferred aid has a much stronger (negative) impact on migration than the previously used total aid variable that includes the non‐transferred component. As may be expected, non‐transferred aid itself does not appear to affect migrant flows. A high share of non‐transferred aid would therefore be at odds with the donors’ stated goal of tackling the root causes of migration. Date: 2020 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:worlde:v:43:y:2020:i:7:p:1951-1976 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article The World Economy is currently edited by David Greenaway More articles in The World Economy from Wiley Blackwell |
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