Suchergebnisse

This paper investigates whether the aid allocation behavior of US Western allies during the Cold War reflected ideological motives. While there is extensive evidence on the ideological motivations underlying the US aid program during the Cold War, little is known about the behavior of western allies who often faced a trade-off between supporting the ideological struggle against the Eastern Bloc and penalizing authoritarian and corrupt regimes through their foreign aid policy. To this end, I extend the analysis of Berger et al (2013) by examining the impact of US and Soviet political influence in recipient countries on the aid allocation behavior of important Western donors over the period 1966-1989. The results suggest a great deal of variation in the extent to which aid allocation reflects ideological motives across Western allies: while Great Britain followed the US and fully embraced the ideological conditionality of foreign aid dictated by the logic of the Cold War, several other Western donors did not support developing countries on ideological grounds.

AbstractStudies analyzing the pattern of international refugee flows have so far focussed on movements to OECD destinations, even though the vast majority of refugees live in non‐OECD countries. Employing a standard gravity model of international migration, we fill this research gap by investigating the impact of destination country characteristics on south‐south refugee movements over the period 2004–2019. Our findings suggest that refugees tend to move to safe neighboring countries but also positively respond to local pull factors such as relatively high per‐capita income levels and the availability of education and health services when choosing their country of destination. Donors have the ability to affect the direction of south‐south refugee movements by investing in the social infrastructure of potential destination countries.

AbstractTackling the root causes of migration from developing countries through development cooperation has been suggested as an essential part of the policy mix in OECD migrant destinations. This is even though the evidence on whether economic development leads to more or less people emigrating is so far inconclusive. We investigate the relationship between income per capita and emigration to OECD countries separately for three different skill groups—low‐skilled, medium‐skilled and high‐skilled emigrants—being the first to employ panel regression approaches that account for cross‐country heterogeneity and cover a policy‐relevant time frame of about 5 years. Our findings reveal a universal negative association between income per capita and emigration for all three skill groups and for different income thresholds. This implies that policy makers should not be too concerned about potential trade‐offs between (successful) development cooperation and immigration management, at least in the short to medium run that our analysis covers. At the same time, the scope for using development cooperation as a migration policy instrument can be considered to be limited given the modest size of the estimated income effect: Taking our point estimates at face value, a 10% rise in GDP per capita would on average lead to about 3600 fewer immigrants per destination.

AbstractDebates on the extent to which developing countries suffer from a brain drain often focus on the emigration of locally scarce health personnel. In this paper, we empirically examine how two potential determinants—aid for health and local income levels—affect the emigration rates of doctors and nurses from developing countries. Employing a standard gravity model of international migration, we show that aid for health has a negative effect on the emigration of both nurses and doctors. Our findings suggest that donors influence the emigration decisions of doctors and nurses through improvements in health infrastructure. Higher income per capita is also associated with lower emigration from developing countries for doctors and nurses alike. Given that nurses typically belong to the poorer segments of populations in the countries of origin, we can conclude that even at low initial income levels, on balance, economic growth provides an incentive to stay.