Modeling Efficiency of Foreign Aid Allocation in Malawi

Philip A. White, Candace Berrett, E. Shannon Neeley-Tass and Michael G. Findley

The American Statistician, 2019, vol. 73, issue 4, 385-399

Abstract: The Open Aid Malawi initiative has collected an unprecedented database that identifies as much location-specific information as possible for each of over 2500 individual foreign aid donations to Malawi since 2003. The efficient use and distribution of such aid is important to donors and to Malawi citizens. However, because of individual donor goals and difficulty in tracking donor coordination it is difficult to determine whether aid allocation is efficient. We compare several Bayesian spatial generalized linear mixed models to relate aid allocation to various economic indicators within seven donation sectors. We find that the spatial gamma regression model best predicts current aid allocation. While we are cautious about making strong claims based on this exploratory study, we provide a methodology by which one could (i) evaluate the efficiency of aid allocation via a study of the locations of current aid allocation as compared to the need at those locations and (ii) come up with a strategy for efficient allocation of resources in conditions where there exists an ideal relationship between aid allocation and economic sectors.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/00031305.2018.1470032 (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:taf:amstat:v:73:y:2019:i:4:p:385-399

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/UTAS20

DOI: 10.1080/00031305.2018.1470032

Access Statistics for this article

The American Statistician is currently edited by Eric Sampson

More articles in The American Statistician from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().