The speed of aid: Strategic urgency in international emergency relief

Andreas Fuchs and Samuel Siewers

No 2290, Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel)

Abstract: Timely assistance is a precondition for effective emergency relief in the aftermath of natural disasters. This paper shows that donor countries take faster aid decisions if they have stronger strategic interests at stake. We analyze a trilateral panel (donor, donor, recipient) of daily humanitarian aid decisions of 43 donor countries following 516 fast-onset natural disasters between 2000 and 2022. Identification relies on daily variation in donor responses and a series of multidimensional fixed effects. Our analysis reveals a bandwagon effect as donors follow their peers' commitments. This is largely explained by trade competition: the more donors compete over export and import markets, the faster they react to each other. The results are driven by government-to-government aid and underscore the importance of recipient-specific lead donors, who are natural first movers. These findings suggest that commercial competition can distort emergency relief and highlight that strategic interests shape even ostensibly altruistic behavior in international humanitarian aid.

Keywords: humanitarian assistance; disaster relief; aid speed; donor competition; United Nations; emergency appeals; trade competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F35 F42 F53 H12 H84 O19 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/320426/1/1929714904.pdf (application/pdf)

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:zbw:ifwkwp:320426

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Kiel Working Papers from Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().