How Foreign Aid Is Used To Buy Votes
<
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/patricia-adams> Patricia Adams
Executive Director, Probe International
Posted: 04/06/2014 5:23 pm
Foreign aid, for decades used by despotic governments to line their pockets
and finance uneconomic projects, is now being used by democratically elected
governments to buy votes and remain in power.
That's the message from a recent study by Ryan S. Jablonski, an assistant
professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, in a
study titled, <
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1902984>
"How Aid Targets Votes: The Impact of Electoral Incentives on Foreign Aid
Distribution." By combining newly available electoral data with foreign aid
data, Jablonski shows that "electoral biases influence aid spending in many,
if not most, aid-dependent states."
Examples abound. In Zimbabwe, citizens looking for food aid before the 2005
election were turned away if they couldn't prove they were supporters of
Robert Mugabe's African National Union-Patriotic Front. In Ethiopia, shortly
before the 2010 election, the government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi
reportedly held back the distribution of foreign aid -- agricultural
supplies and food aid -- from families that failed to vote for his party,
the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front. And in Pakistan,
foreign emergency relief offered in the wake of flooding in 2010 was
allegedly withheld from opposition strongholds.
This latest abuse of foreign aid follows the West's trend over the last two
decades to <
http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~brown/pages/Stephen_Brown_EJDR.pdf> tie
aid to democratic reforms. More and more, poor countries are holding
elections to qualify for foreign aid.
The problem, according to Jablonski, is that donor countries often "lack
information about who is most deserving of aid funds" and so delegate that
responsibility to recipient governments, who then take advantage of the
windfall by delivering those funds to voters most likely to keep them in
office.
In Kenya, where Jablonski mined aid and electoral data, this model worked
along ethnic lines, with incumbent political parties using the foreign aid
money at their disposal to help their own -- or allied -- ethnic groups
within the country.
Looking at the three different ethnic coalitions that have led the country
since 1992 (Moi's Kalenjin, Kibaki's Kikuyu, and Odinga's Luo tribes),
Jablonski shows that during their time in power, communities within each
ethnic group -- or in a coalition with them -- received an above average,
per capita amount of aid. When they were no longer in power, the reverse was
true.
And while Jablonski uses Kenya as the chief testing ground for his
hypothesis, he points to other developing countries -- including Zimbabwe,
Ethiopia, the Philippines and Pakistan -- where governments have reportedly
used foreign aid funds for political ends.
Delegating responsibility for aid distribution to poor governments, he
concludes, "has perverse consequences" since "their first priority is to
remain in power."
While donors often talk about accountability when it comes to the use of
their aid money, Jablonski says they "often lack the ability -- or
willingness -- to distinguish between the neediest and the most politically
expedient recipients." After all, the aid donors aren't up for re-election.
Needless to say, the use of foreign aid for porkbarrel shouldn't surprise
aid officials. More robust democracies anticipate such abuses and have laws
to expose and stop them. Not so in the
<
http://www.wider.unu.edu/publications/working-papers/2012/en_GB/wp2012-033/
> opaque world of foreign aid where donors and recipient governments share
an interest in turning a blind eye to abuses.
Aid agencies are loathe to admit that their aid is used corruptly or for
political patronage: They fear ruffling diplomatic feathers, undermining
public support for foreign aid at home, and revealing their failure to help
lift the poor out of poverty. Better to see no evil. Indeed, as Jablonski
points out, donors may even prefer the candidate who is using their funds to
secure power.
Many experts liken aid to the "
<
http://journal.probeinternational.org/2004/09/10/resource-curse/> resource
curse," whereby foreign aid - like oil wells or diamond mines - allows
governments to be independent of their people by increasing the availability
of public funds. Jablonski raises this issue, too: "governments may be less
likely to collect taxes and more willing to divert public funds toward
political supporters. These effects may jointly reduce the accountability of
governments to voters by breaking the link between accountability and
revenue and increasing the cost of mobilizing against the government."
Aid agencies
<
http://www.odi.org.uk/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/publications-opinio
n-files/241.pdf> brought in democratic reforms in the 1990s when they
realized that dictatorships didn't lend themselves to development. Now they
are coming to realize that foreign aid itself may undermine democracy.
Patricia Adams and Brady Yauch are economists at Toronto-based
<
http://journal.probeinternational.org/> Probe International.
Received on Wed Jun 04 2014 - 13:00:44 EDT