15:30 - 17:45
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Rabia Malik
Discussant/s:
Rabia Malik, Jens Eger
Meeting Room B

Ringailė Kuokštytė, Vytautas Kuokštis
Drivers of bilateral aid of EU member states: Evidence from a time-series cross-section analysis

Daniela Donno, Sarah Bush, Pär Zetterberg
Rewarding Women's Rights in Dictatorships

Cleo O'Brien-Udry
Aid, Blame, and Backlash: The Political Economy of Unpopular Aid

Lennart Kaplan
'Reversed favoritism' -- Resolving the puzzle of discriminatory taxation in African agriculture
Drivers of bilateral aid of EU member states: Evidence from a time-series cross-section analysis
Ringailė Kuokštytė 1, Vytautas Kuokštis 2
1 General Jonas Žemaitis Military Academy of Lithuania
2 Institute of International Relations and Political Science, Vilnius University

The paper leverages variation over time in and across individual EU member states’ bilateral aid per recipient category (least developed countries, lower-middle and upper-middle income recipients) to test for a systematic influence of diverse predictors on aid to gross national income (GNI) ratios during the contemporary period (2000–2017). We quantitatively investigate the explanatory power of main domestic variables (government ideology, prevalence of socialdemocratic culture, political elites' intrinsic commitment to aid) and international factors (political and economic interests, emulation, EU pressure), which represents an effort to analyse development aid in a comprehensive conceptual framework. We draw on the existing theoretical and empirical research but also innovate. Different categories of recipient countries are possibly subject to dissimilar influences, which remains unaccounted for in empirical studies predominantly using aggregate levels of development assistance. This may compromise empirically-based recipes for reducing aid volatility and increasing aid effectiveness, in particular in the least developed countries. Our analysis, which takes into consideration methodologically-sensitive aspects of the data structure, yields results pointing to relatively different but also some similar effects between the three recipient categories.