Diplomatic Visits and Development Assistance

Oasis Kodila-Tedika and Sherif Khalifa
Additional contact information
Oasis Kodila-Tedika: University of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo
Sherif Khalifa: California State University, Fullerton, U.S.A

Journal of Economic Development, 2026, vol. 51, issue 1, 65-89

Abstract: This paper examines the effect of the visits by U.S. officials to a country on its foreign aid inflows. To achieve our objective, we compile variables that indicate the official visits of U.S. Presidents and Secretaries of State from 1960-2019, derived from the historical archives of the U.S. State Department. We examine the effect of these variables on U.S. aid and total official development assistance flows to the country. To deal with potential endogeneity, we use the Endogenous Treatment Model. The estimation results show that the visits of U.S. officials have a statistically significant positive effect on U.S. aid only when the visit is part of a multilateral meeting, while the effect of the visits of U.S. Presidents have a statistically significant positive effect on total official development assistance only when the visit is in the form of a bilateral meeting. We provide a potential interpretation for these patterns.

Keywords: Foreign Aid; Development Assistance; Executive; Official Visits (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 F35 F54 H11 O19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://jed.cau.ac.kr/archives/51-1/51-1-3.pdf Full text
None

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:ris:jecdev:022429

DOI: 10.35866/caujed.2026.51.1.003

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Economic Development is currently edited by Sung Y. Park

More articles in Journal of Economic Development from The Economic Research Institute, Chung-Ang University Room 1040, Building 310, Chung-Ang University, 84 Heukseok-ro, Dongjak-gu, Seoul 06974, South Korea. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tram Nguyen ().