Organization of disaster aid delivery: spending your donations

J. Vernon Henderson and Yong Suk Lee

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: This paper examines how different organizational structures in disaster aid delivery affect house aid quality. We analyze three waves of survey data on fishermen and fishing villages in Aceh, Indonesia following the tsunami. We categorize four organizational structures based on whether and to whom donors contract aid implementation. Compared to bilateral contracting between donors and implementers, donors that vertically integrate and do their own implementation offer the highest quality housing as rated by village heads and have fewer counts of faults, such as leaky roofs and cracked walls, as reported by fishermen. However, they shade in quality as they lose dominance as the leading aid agency in a village. Domestic implementers and the government agency that was responsible for significant portions of aid delivery provide significantly lower quality aid. We also examine how the imposition of shared ownership, the primary social agenda for boat aid agencies, affects boat aid quality. We find that village and fishing leaders steer poor quality boats towards those whom shared ownership were imposed upon, often lower status fishermen.

Keywords: natural disasters; tsunami; aid; disaster relief; moral hazard; social agendas; non-profit firms; organizational structures (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F35 H4 H5 L2 L3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-07
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Published in Economic Development and Cultural Change, July, 2015, 63(4), pp. 617-664. ISSN: 0013-0079

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/87613/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Organization of Disaster Aid Delivery: Spending Your Donations (2015)
Working Paper: Organization of Disaster Aid Delivery: Spending Your Donations (2011)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:87613

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