Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-pftt2 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-05-15T11:43:22.828Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Clarifying the Foreign Aid Puzzle: A Comparison of American, Japanese, French, and Swedish Aid Flows

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Peter J. Schraeder ,
Steven W. Hook  and
Bruce Taylor
Peter J. Schraeder
Affiliation:
Loyola University Chicago
Steven W. Hook
Affiliation:
Kent State University
Bruce Taylor
Affiliation:
Loyola University Chicago
Get access

Abstract

This study explores the donor side of debates revolving around the proper role of foreign assistance as a foreign policy tool, by empirically testing for the aid determinants of four industrial democracies: France, Japan, Sweden, and the United States. A pooled cross-sectional time-series design is employed to assess the impacts of six sets of variables on aidflowsto thirty-six African states during the 1980s. Three sets of these variables—humanitarian need, strategic importance, and economic potential—are constructed using data traditionally employed in empirical foreign aid studies. Three additional sets of variables—cultural similarity, ideological stance, and region—are constructed from data that regional specialists consider to be important in the foreign aid equation. Although no two cases are alike, one can nevertheless draw some tentative conclusions about the nature of the foreign aid regime of the final cold war decade of the 1980s on the basis of several cross-national patterns. In short, the results (1) contradict rhetorical statements of northern policymakers who claim that foreign aid serves as an altruistic foreign policy tool designed to relieve humanitarian suffering; (2) confirm the expected importance of strategic and ideological factors in a foreign aid regime heavily influenced by the cold war; and (3) underscore the importance of economic, particularly trade, interests in northern aid calculations.

Type
Research Article
Information
World Politics , Volume 50 , Issue 2 , January 1998 , pp. 294 - 323
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1998

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See, for example, Linear, Marcus, Zapping the Third World: The Disaster of Development Aid (London: Pluto Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

2 See, for example, Poe, Steven C., “Human Rights and Economic Aid under Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter,” American Journal of Political Science 36 (February 1992)Google Scholar.

3 See, for example, Menkhaus, Kenneth J. and Kegley, Charles W. Jr., “The Compliant Foreign Policy of the Dependent State Revisited,” Comparative Political Studies 21 (October 1988)Google Scholar; and JSMoon, Bruce E., “Consensus or Compliance? Foreign Policy Change and External Dependence,” International Organization 39 (Spring 1985)Google Scholar.

4 McKinlay, R. D., “The Aid Relationship: A Foreign Policy Model and Interpretation of the Distributions of Official Bilateral Economic Aid of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany, 1960–1970,” Comparative Political Studies 11 (January 1979)Google Scholar.

5 Hook, Steven W., National Interest and Foreign Aid (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1995)Google Scholar.

6 See Noel, Alain and Thérien, Jean-Philippe, “From Domestic to International Justice: The Welfare State and Foreign Aid,” International Organization 49 (Summer 1995)Google Scholar.

7 See, for example, Black, Lloyd D., The Strategy of Foreign Aid (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand, 1968)Google Scholar. For a more recent example, see Eberstadt, Nicholas, Foreign Aid and American Purpose (Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute, 1988)Google Scholar.

8 See Gilpin, Robert, The Political Economy of International Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

9 See, for example, Kegley, Charles W. Jr., ed., Controversies in International Relations Theory: Realism and the Neoliberal Challenge (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and idem, “The Neoidealist Moment in International Studies? Realist Myths and the New International Realities,” International Studies Quarterly 37 (June 1993)Google Scholar.

10 See, for example, Lumsdaine, David Halloran, Moral Vision in International Politics: The Foreign did Regime, 1949–89 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; and Cingranelli, David Louis, Ethics, American Foreign Policy and the Third World (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

11 See, for example, Wood, Robert E., From Marshall Plan to Debt Crisis: Foreign Aid and Development Choices in the WorldEconomy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Hayter, Theresa and Watson, Catherine, Aid: Rhetoric or Reality (London: Pluto Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

12 See Riddell, Roger C., Foreign Aid Reconsidered (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

13 See Hook, Steven W. and Spanier, John, American Foreign Policy since World War II, 14th ed. (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1998)Google Scholar; and Schraeder, Peter J., ed., Intervention into the 1990s: U.S. Foreign Policy in the Third World (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1992)Google Scholar.

14 Hasegawa, Sukehiro, Japanese Foreign Aid: Policy and Practice (New York: Praeger, 1975), 3Google Scholar.

15 John Stirling, “Japan and Asia: A ‘Business Foreign Policy,’” Asian Affairs (July-August 1981), 354.

16 Scalapino, Robert A., “The Foreign Policy of Modern Japan,” in Macridis, Roy A., ed., Foreign Policy in World Politics, 8th ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1992), 206Google Scholar.

17 Nester, William R. Japan and the Third World: Pattern, Power and Prospects (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), 233Google Scholar.

18 Karre, Bo and Svensson, Bengt, “The Determinants of Swedish Aid Policy,” in Stokke, Olav, ed., Western Middle Powers and Global Poverty: The Determinants of the Aid Policies of Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden (Uppsala, Sweden: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1989), 231Google Scholar.

19 Stokke (fn. 18), 2–3.

20 Ibid.

21 See Pratt, C., ed., Middle Power Internationalism: The North-South Dimension (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

22 Kolodziej, Edward A., French Foreign Policy under de Gaulle and Pompidou: The Politics of Grandeur (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1974), 479Google Scholar.

23 Grosser, Alfred, French Foreign Policy under de Gaulle (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 61Google Scholar.

24 Hayter, Theresa, French Aid (London: Overseas Development Institute, 1966), 43Google Scholar.

25 See, for example, Lebovic, James H., “National Interests and U.S. Foreign Aid: The Carter and Reagan Years,” Journal of Peace Research 25 (June 1988)Google Scholar; and Richardson, Neil R., Foreign Policy and Economic Dependence (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

26 McKinlay (fn. 4) compares the cases of the U.S., the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Hook (fn. 5) compares the cases of the U.S., France, Japan, and Sweden.

27 OECD, Geographical Distribution of Financial Flows to Developing Countries (Paris: OECD, 1981–1995)Google Scholar. Security assistance is omitted from the current study because donor interests in extending these forms of aid are more transparent than are the objectives behind transfers of economic aid. It is precisely the ambiguity inherent in economic aid that we attempt to rectify through our cross-national analysis.

28 The countries in our data set include Algeria, Angola, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gabon, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Togo, Tunisia, Uganda, Zaire, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

29 In order to minimize the problems associated with utilizing cases of differing size in regression, all of the interval-level variables have been standardized to either GNP or population of recipient country (except for the trade variable, which has been standardized to total imports). This corrects for the heteroskedastic distribution of the raw data and decreases the importance of potentially influential cases.

30 The source of this data is the World Bank's World Development Report supplemented by the World Bank's World Tables of Economic and Social Indicators (1950–88), ICPSR Dataset 9300.

31 The source for military spending is the SIPRI Yearbook: World Armaments and Disarmament (various years), published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Military force data are from World Military Expenditures andArms Transfers, the annual report of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

32 The source of trade data is Direction of Trade Statistics, a report of the International Monetary Fund. GNP per capita data are derived from World Military Expenditures andArms Transfers, provided by the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

33 Moss, Joanna and Ravenhill, John, “Trade Diversification in Black Africa,” Journal of Modern African Studies 27 (September 1989)Google Scholar.

34 Ibid.

35 Young, Crawford, Ideology andDevelopment in Africa (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

36 See Grundy, Kenneth, “The Impact of Region on Contemporary African Politics,” in Carter, Gwendolen M. and O'Meara, Patrick, eds., African Independence: The First Twenty-five Yean (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

37 Ibid., 99.

38 For equation 1, the reference categories are former British colonies for Colonial Heritage; self-proclaimed Marxist countries for Ideology, and North African countries for Region. For equation 2, the reference categories are former French colonies for Colonial Heritage; capitalist countries for Ideology, and West African countries for Region.

39 See Hicks, Alexander M., “Introduction to Pooling,” in Janoski, Thomas and Hicks, Alexander M., eds., The Comparative Political Economy of the Welfare State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; and Hsaio, Cheng, Analysis of Panel Data (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

40 GLSE accounts for this error structure by estimating autocorrelation as the ratio of the unexplained sum of squares from the OLS solution less the unexplained sum of squares from the Least Squares with Dummy Variables solution to the unexplained sum of squares from the OLS solution. Calculations were made with the Microcrunch statistical analysis program.

41 See Lefebvre, Jeffrey A., Armsfor the Horn: U. S. Security Policy in Ethiopia and Somalia, 1953–1991 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

42 Schraeder, Peter J., United States Foreign Policy toward Africa: Incrementalism, Crisis and Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 248Google Scholar.

43 Clough, Michael, Free at Last? U. S. Foreign Policy toward Africa and the End ofthe Cold War (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1994), 77Google Scholar.

44 Kelly, Sean, America's Tyrant: The CIA and Mobutu of Zaire (Washington, D.C.: American University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

45 Clough (fh. 43), 76–100.

46 Gibbs, David N., The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money, and U.S. Policy in the Congo Crisis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

47 See Crawford Young's review of Gibbs (fn. 46), in Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24 (Autumn 1993), 401-3Google Scholar. See also Schraeder, Peter J., “Reviewing the Study of U.S. Policy towards Africa: From Intellectual ‘Backwater’ to Theory Construction,” Third World Quarterly 14, no. 4 (1994)Google Scholar.

48 Nester (fn. 17), 238–39.

49 See Young (fn. 35).

50 See, for example, Ampiah, Kweku, “Japanese Aid to Tanzania: A Study of the Political Marketing of Japan in Africa,” African Affairs 95 (1996)Google Scholar.

51 See Young (fn. 35), 97–182.

52 See Sandbrook, Richard, The Politics of Africa's Economic Recovery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

53 Glickman, Harvey, “Tanzania: From Disillusionment to Guarded Optimism,” Current History 96, no. 610 (1997), 217Google Scholar.

54 David Black, “Little Big Power? Swedish Policy toward Southern Africa in the 1980s” (Paper presented at the annual convention of the International Studies Association, Atlanta, Ga., March 31-April 4,1992), 6.

55 Ibid.

56 Sellstrom, Tor, “Some Factors behind Nordic Relations with Southern Africa,” in Oden, Bertil and Othman, Harold, eds., Regional Cooperation in Southern Africa: A Post-Apartheid Perspective (Uppsala, Sweden: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1989)Google Scholar.

57 Black (fn. 54), 1.

58 See Minter, William, Apartheid's Contras: An Enquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique (London: Zed Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

59 See, for example, Laatikainen, Katie Verlin, “The Disillusionment of Nordic Aid,” in Hook, Steven W., ed., Foreign Aid toward the Millennium (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1996)Google Scholar.

60 Martin, Guy, “Continuity and Change in Franco-African Relations,” in Harbeson, John W. and Rothchild, Donald, eds., Africa in World Politics (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1995), 14Google Scholar.

61 Foccart (with Gaillard, Philippe), Foccart parle: entretiens avec Philippe Gaillard (Paris: Fayard, 1990)Google Scholar, 1:310–11.

62 See Bayart, Jean-François, La politique africaine de François Mitterrand (Paris: Karthala, 1984)Google Scholar.

63 Chipman, John, French Power in Africa (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell, 1989)Google Scholar.

64 Martin (fn. 60).

65 , Patrick and Guillaumont, Sylvianne, Zone franc et développement africain (Paris: Economica, 1984)Google Scholar.

66 Whiteman, Kaye, “France/Africa: The Party's Ova” Africa Report 39 (March-April 1994), 13–18Google Scholar.

67 For further discussion, see Breuning, Marijke, “Words and Deeds: Foreign Assistance Rhetoric and Policy Behavior in the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United Kingdom,” Internationa! Studies Quarterly 39, no. 2 (1995)Google Scholar.

68 See Sandbrook (fn. 52).

69 OECD, Development Cooperation (Paris: OECD, 1991)Google Scholar.