Publication: Individual and Country-Level Factors Affecting Support for Foreign Aid
Loading...
Date
2008-09
ISSN
Published
2008-09
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
In recent years donor countries have committed to dramatic increases in the supply of foreign aid to developing countries. Meeting and sustaining such commitments will require sufficient support among donor country voters and taxpayers. The determinants of public opinion in donor countries on foreign aid have received little attention. This paper examines attitudes to foreign aid with a large, multi-level, cross-national study. It outlines a theoretical rationale for support for foreign aid, discussing the importance of both individual factors and economic and social structures. The theory is tested with multi-level models, including both individual-level and country-level variables to predict positive attitudes. Two datasets are used to measure attitudes in donor countries: (1) the 1995 World Values Survey has information from approximately 6,000 individuals in nine countries and asks a rich battery of questions at the individual-level, and (2) the 2002 Gallup "Voice of the People" survey asks fewer questions of individuals but includes 17 donor countries. Using both surveys combines their distinct strengths and allows tests of individual and national-level theories across disparate samples. The results generally support the predictions that attitudes toward aid are influenced by religiosity, beliefs about the causes of poverty, awareness of international affairs, and trust in people and institutions.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“Paxton, Pamela; Knack, Stephen. 2008. Individual and Country-Level Factors Affecting Support for Foreign Aid. Policy Research Working Paper No. 4714. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/6984 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication The Asymmetric Bank Distress Amplifier of Recessions(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-11)One defining feature of financial crises, evident in U.S. and international data, is asymmetric bank distress—concentrated losses on a subset of banks. This paper proposes a model in which shocks to borrowers’ productivity dispersion lead to asymmetric bank losses. The framework exhibits a “bank distress amplifier,” exacerbating economic downturns by causing costly bank failures and raising uncertainty about the solvency of banks, thereby pushing banks to deleverage. Quantitative analysis shows that the bank distress amplifier doubles investment decline and increases the spread by 2.5 times during the Great Recession compared to a standard financial accelerator model. The mechanism helps explain how a seemingly small shock can sometimes trigger a large crisis.Publication From Tailwinds to Headwinds(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-10)The first quarter of the twenty-first century has been transformative for emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs). These economies now account for about 45 percent of global GDP, up from about 25 percent in 2000, a trend driven by robust collective growth in the three largest EMDEs—China, India, and Brazil (the EM3). Collectively, EMDEs have contributed about 60 percent of annual global growth since 2000, on average, double the share during the 1990s. Their ascendance was powered by swift global trade and financial integration, especially during the first decade of the century. Interdependence among these economies has also increased markedly. Today, nearly half of goods exports from EMDEs go to other EMDEs, compared to one-quarter in 2000. As cross-border linkages have strengthened, business cycles among EMDEs and between EMDEs and advanced economies have become more synchronized, and a distinct EMDE business cycle has emerged. Cross-border business cycle spillovers from the EM3 to other EMDEs are sizable, at about half of the magnitude of spillovers from the largest advanced economies (the United States, the euro area, and Japan). Yet EMDEs confront a host of headwinds at the turn of the second quarter of the century. Progress implementing structural reforms in many of these economies has stalled. Globally, protectionist measures and geopolitical fragmentation have risen sharply. High debt burdens, demographic shifts, and the rising costs of climate change weigh on economic prospects. A successful policy approach to accelerate growth and development should focus on boosting investment and productivity, navigating a difficult external environment, and enhancing macroeconomic stability.Publication Intergenerational Income Mobility around the World(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-07-09)This paper introduces a new global database with estimates of intergenerational income mobility for 87 countries, covering 84 percent of the world’s population. This marks a notable expansion of the cross-country evidence base on income mobility, particularly among low- and middle-income countries. The estimates indicate that the negative association between income mobility and inequality (known as the Great Gatsby Curve) continues to hold across this wider range of countries. The database also reveals a positive association between income mobility and national income per capita, suggesting that countries achieve higher levels of intergenerational mobility as they grow richer.Publication The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29)Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.Publication Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05)Recent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Poverty and Policy Selectivity of World Bank Trust Funds(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-06)Over the past decade, donors of foreign aid quadrupled their annual contributions to trust funds at the World Bank. This earmarking of contributions to donors' preferred recipient countries and issues has raised concerns about the alignment of trust funds with the performance-based allocations of aid by the International Development Association, the World Bank's concessional lending arm, and raises the question of the role of this new "multi-bi" aid channel. This study finds that the cross-country allocations of aggregate trust fund aid are poverty- and policy-selective. In this respect, they are much more similar to allocations from the International Development Association than from bilateral donors. The allocations of trust fund types that are more closely controlled by donor countries—recipient-executed and single-donor trust funds—are more strongly related to the strategic interests of donor countries than trust fund aid in general. Trust funds for health and education aid are poverty selective and positively correlated with the World Bank's assessment of the quality of countries' sector policies, while environmental trust funds are neither poverty selective nor correlated with the assessed quality of countries' environmental policies. Overall, the evidence indicates that multi-bi funds administered by the World Bank do not undermine the International Development Association’s allocation criteria.Publication Civil Society and Peacebuilding : Potential, Limitations and Critical Factors(Washington, DC, 2007-02)This report develops and discusses a new analytical framework to understand the functions of civil society in peace building. In theory and practice, there is a wide variety of ways to categorize civil society contributions to development and peacebuilding. Donors tend to employ actor-oriented perspectives, focusing on supporting activities of different types of civil society organizations in a given situation. This report proposes to move toward a functional perspective, centered on the roles that different actors can play in conflict situations. The analysis shows that civil society can make numerous positive contributions and have unique potential to support peacebuilding and conflict mitigation. It can do so independently as actor in its own right, or in relation to peacebuilding processes and programs led by Governments or the international community. Despite many successful initiatives on the ground, however, civil society should not be considered a panacea. The existence of civil society per se cannot be equated with the existence of peacebuilding actors. Similarly, civil society strengthening and support does not automatically contribute to peacebuilding. While civil society organizations are frequently actors for peace, they equally have the potential to become actors of violence. So far, outcomes and impacts of different civil society peace interventions have not been sufficiently evaluated. Civil society and donors need to more strategically identify the objectives and demonstrate the relevance of the particular approaches they propose to engage in different phases of conflict/peacebuilding. Without greater clarity regarding objectives and intended impacts, and, without addressing existing institutional constraints and distortions, activities run the risk of being well-intentioned, but unlikely to achieve sustainable results.Publication Which Donors, Which Funds?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10)The rapid growth of trust funds at multilateral development organizations has been widely neglected in the academic literature so far. Using a simple illustrative model, this paper examines the choice by sovereign donors among various trust fund options. The authors contend that the choice among the different trust funds involves a fundamental trade-off: larger funds provide donors with the benefit of burden sharing. Conversely, each donor can better assert its individual preferences in a fund with fewer other donors. The theoretical considerations yield testable implications on a range of factors affecting this fundamental tradeoff, most notably the area of intervention of the trust fund and competing domestic interests of donor countries. Using a sample of World Bank trust funds, the paper examines the participation decisions of Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development/Development Assistance Committee donors over the past decade. In line with the theoretical argument, preference homogeneity among donors as well as indicators for global activities and fragile states assistance are robust determinants of participation in (large) multi-donor funds. In contrast, donors tend to prefer single-donor trust funds in areas in which their national interests dominate. Although they could use bilateral aid for the same purpose, they often prefer to channel their contributions through trust funds at multilateral agencies. Donors thereby reduce their own administrative costs, while benefiting from the expertise of the multilateral agency. These findings confirm prior qualitative case studies and evidence from donor reports, suggesting that reduced reliance on single-donor trust funds—a costly instrument from the perspective of multilateral agencies—can improve the development effectiveness of aid.Publication Parliaments as Peacebuilders in Conflict-Affected Countries(2008)The role of parliament in conflict-affected countries becomes even more evident when the correlation between poverty and conflict is considered. This book is pioneering in that it considers what parliaments in conflict-affected countries can do, while performing their normal everyday functions, to not only contribute directly to conflict prevention but also aid peace building by combating poverty. By addressing issues of poverty, equitable distribution of resources, and economic development, parliamentarians can attempt to guard against the creation of an enabling environment that is prone to the escalation of conflict. In line with their respective missions, the World Bank Institute and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association have examined issues facing parliamentary development in the hope of strengthening parliaments' capacity to tackle the diverse challenges they face. Among those challenges is meeting growing community expectations of the contribution parliaments make to resolving important issues and addressing community demands. In recognition of the rising number of parliaments that are operating in conflict-affected societies, the World Bank Institute has sought to better understand the challenges faced by parliaments in conflict-affected countries and the role parliaments can play in conflict management and poverty alleviation.Publication Financing Peace(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2010-10-06)After more than a decade of experience and research on financing arrangements in post conflict countries and fragile states, a consensus has emerged on at least one matter. The core objective is to build effective and legitimate governance structures that secure public confidence through provision of personal security, equal justice and the rule of law, economic well-being, and essential social services including education and health. These governance structures are necessary to ensure that countries do not turn, or turn back, to violence as a means of negotiating state-societal relations. This paper discusses a number of the weaknesses in current financing arrangements for post conflict countries and fragile states, with a focus on Official Development Assistance (ODA). We argue that tensions persist between business-as-usual development policies on the one hand and policies responsive to the demands of peace building on the other. The preferential allocation of aid to 'good performers,' in the name of maximizing its payoff in terms of economic growth, militates against aid to fragile and conflict-affected states. If the aim of aid is redefined to include durable peace, the conventional performance criteria for aid allocation lose much of their force. Compelling arguments can be made for assistance to 'poor performers' if this can help to prevent conflict. Yet the difficulties that initially prompted donors to become more selective in aid allocation remain all too real. Experience has shown that aid can exacerbate problems rather than solving them.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication World Development Report 1984(New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Long-term needs and sustained effort are underlying themes in this year's report. As with most of its predecessors, it is divided into two parts. The first looks at economic performance, past and prospective. The second part is this year devoted to population - the causes and consequences of rapid population growth, its link to development, why it has slowed down in some developing countries. The two parts mirror each other: economic policy and performance in the next decade will matter for population growth in the developing countries for several decades beyond. Population policy and change in the rest of this century will set the terms for the whole of development strategy in the next. In both cases, policy changes will not yield immediate benefits, but delay will reduce the room for maneuver that policy makers will have in years to come.Publication Tanzania(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-06)This study aims to achieve a better understanding of the agricultural risk and risk management situation in Tanzania with a view to identifying key solutions to reduce current gross domestic product (GDP) growth volatility. For the purpose of this assessment, risk is defined as the probability that an uncertain event will occur that can potentially produce losses to participants along the supply chain. Persistence of unmanaged risks in agriculture is a cause of great economic losses for farmers and other actors along the supply chains (for example, traders, processors, and exporters), affecting export earnings and food security. The agricultural sector risk assessment is a straightforward methodology based on a three-phase sequential process. Phase analyzes the chronological occurrence of inter-seasonal agricultural risks with a view to identify and prioritize the risks that are the drivers of agricultural GDP volatility. This report contains the findings and recommendations of the first phase and includes the identification, analysis, and prioritization of major risks facing the agricultural sector in Tanzania, as well as recommendations regarding key solutions. Chapter one gives introduction and context. Chapter two contains an overview of the agricultural sector and its performance, as well as a discussion of key agro-climatic, weather, and policy restrictions and opportunities. Chapter three includes an assessment of major risks (that is, production, market, and enabling environment risks) facing key export and food crops. Chapter four presents an estimate of historical losses due to realized production risks and a correlation of such losses with production volatility. Chapter five provides insights into the exposure to risks by different stakeholders and their actual capacities, vulnerabilities, and potential to manage agricultural risks. Chapter six presents a risk prioritization by different supply chains and discusses the possible solutions, as well as specific recommendations for the agricultural sector development program (ASDP).Publication Ten Steps to a Results-Based Monitoring and Evaluation System : A Handbook for Development Practitioners(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2004)An effective state is essential to achieving socio-economic and sustainable development. With the advent of globalization, there are growing pressures on governments and organizations around the world to be more responsive to the demands of internal and external stakeholders for good governance, accountability and transparency, greater development effectiveness, and delivery of tangible results. Governments, parliaments, citizens, the private sector, Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs), civil society, international organizations, and donors are among the stakeholders interested in better performance. As demands for greater accountability and real results have increased, there is an attendant need for enhanced results-based monitoring and evaluation of policies, programs, and projects. This handbook provides a comprehensive ten-step model that will help guide development practitioners through the process of designing and building a results-based monitoring and evaluation system. These steps begin with a 'readiness assessment' and take the practitioner through the design, management, and importantly, the sustainability of such systems. The handbook describes each step in detail, the tasks needed to complete each one, and the tools available to help along the way.Publication Africa's Future, Africa's Challenge : Early Childhood Care and Development in Sub-Saharan Africa(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2008)This book seeks to achieve a balance, describing challenges that are being faced as well as developments that are underway. It seeks a balance in terms of the voices heard, including not just voices of the North commenting on the South, but voices from the South, and in concert with the North. It seeks to provide the voices of specialists and generalists, of those from international and local organizations, from academia and the field. It seeks a diversity of views and values. Such diversity and complexity are the reality of Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) today. The major focus of this book is on SSA from the Sahel south. Approximately 130 million children between birth and age 6 live in SSA. Every year 27 million children are born, and every year 4.7 million children under age 5 die. Rates of birth and of child deaths are consistently higher in SSA than in any other part of the world; the under-5 mortality rate of 163 per 1,000 is twice that of the rest of the developing world and 30 times that of industrialized countries (UNICEF 2006). Of the children who are born, 65 percent will experience poverty, 14 million will be orphans affected by HIV/AIDS directly and within their families and one-third will experience exclusion because of their gender or ethnicity.Publication World Development Report 2017(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2017-01-30)Why are carefully designed, sensible policies too often not adopted or implemented? When they are, why do they often fail to generate development outcomes such as security, growth, and equity? And why do some bad policies endure? This book addresses these fundamental questions, which are at the heart of development. Policy making and policy implementation do not occur in a vacuum. Rather, they take place in complex political and social settings, in which individuals and groups with unequal power interact within changing rules as they pursue conflicting interests. The process of these interactions is what this Report calls governance, and the space in which these interactions take place, the policy arena. The capacity of actors to commit and their willingness to cooperate and coordinate to achieve socially desirable goals are what matter for effectiveness. However, who bargains, who is excluded, and what barriers block entry to the policy arena determine the selection and implementation of policies and, consequently, their impact on development outcomes. Exclusion, capture, and clientelism are manifestations of power asymmetries that lead to failures to achieve security, growth, and equity. The distribution of power in society is partly determined by history. Yet, there is room for positive change. This Report reveals that governance can mitigate, even overcome, power asymmetries to bring about more effective policy interventions that achieve sustainable improvements in security, growth, and equity. This happens by shifting the incentives of those with power, reshaping their preferences in favor of good outcomes, and taking into account the interests of previously excluded participants. These changes can come about through bargains among elites and greater citizen engagement, as well as by international actors supporting rules that strengthen coalitions for reform.