L’efficacité de l’aide au développement est aujourd’hui largement débattue au sein de la communauté des donateurs et dans la littérature académique (Rajan and Subramanian, 2008). Le contexte institutionnel des pays récipiendaires est au cœur de ce débat puisqu’il conditionnerait l’efficacité de l’aide en termes de croissance économique (Dalgaard and Hansen (2001), Collier and Dollar (2002) and Burnside and Dollar, 2004). L’aide serait efficace dans les pays pauvres et bien gouvernés. L’objet de ce travail de recherche est d’expliquer l’apparition de critères institutionnels dans l’allocation de l’aide au développement et de déterminer leurs effets en matière d’efficacité de l’aide. Il vise donc à appréhender le rôle joué par la gouvernance dans les pays receveurs (pays en développement) et dans les pays donateurs (pays de l’OCDE essentiellement) à la fois dans l’allocation et dans l’efficacité de l’aide au développement. Ce travail tente donc de répondre à plusieurs interrogations : (1) la reconnaissance de la nature institutionnelle de l’aide est-elle appropriée ? (2) l’aide est-elle- intrinsèquement politique ? (3) quelles sont les implications économiques de l’aide allouée selon des critères institutionnels ? / The recognition that political institutions matter is relatively recent and is the result of several interacting factors. The purpose of our research is to explain how foreign aid is related to governance issues both in recipient countries (developing countries) and in donor countries. Development aid is provided by: bilateral donors (29 DAC3 donors and 19 non-DAC donors), multilateral donors and private donors (e.g. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation). Foreign aid differs according to the intended purposes: reforming national policies (economic policies or other types) and political institutions, and providing humanitarian assistance. The focus of our dissertation is on the emergence of non-strictly economic criteria (mainly institutional criteria) within the donor community as well as their impact on aid allocation and effectiveness. Therefore, we will address several questions: (1) Is the recognition of the institutional nature of aid appropriate?(2) Is aid political? (3) What are the economic implications of political aid (or aid based on institutional performance) ?

Este trabalho tem como objetivos analisar os acordos ajuda externa assinados pelo Brasil entre 2005 e 2010 e estudá-los à luz das diretrizes diplomáticas brasileiras no período, identificando suas determinantes conjunturais e estruturais. Em oposição às modalidades tradicionais de cooperação internacional, que são acordadas entre países com diferentes níveis de desenvolvimento econômico e diferentes interesses estratégicos, a cooperação Sul-Sul se caracteriza por envolver países em desenvolvimento, com maior potencial de identificação mútua e de convergência de interesses. Não surpreende, portanto, que essa modalidade tenha ganhado força ultimamente, na medida em que países emergentes alcançam projeção internacional e se encontram em condições mais favoráveis para fortalecer laços diplomáticos, promover o desenvolvimento econômico de parceiros comerciais (efetivos ou potenciais) e aumentar, quantitativa e qualitativamente, sua influência no âmbito internacional. No Brasil, o órgão responsável pela articulação dos acordos de cooperação internacional é a Agência Brasileira de Cooperação, vinculado ao Ministério das Relações Exteriores. Sua criação, em 1987, acompanhou o processo de abertura democrática do país e sua atuação já atravessa sete mandatos presidenciais tão variados em suas orientações políticas quanto nos contextos externos que eles enfrentaram. A compreensão de sua relevância estratégica na política externa brasileira não acompanhou, entretanto, a atenção que a Agência Brasileira de Cooperação tem ganhado por parte do governo federal. Este trabalho pretende analisar, a partir de um conjunto de dados coletados junto à Agência Brasileira de Cooperação, a política externa brasileira e a relevância estratégica que os projetos de cooperação Sul-Sul ganharam nos últimos governos. / This dissertation has two main objectives: analyze the aid donation agreements signed by Brazil between 2005 and 2010 and study their relation to the main ideas informing Brazilian diplomatic relations in the period. As opposed to traditional models of international cooperation, which are agreed between countries with different economic capacities and different strategic interests, South-South cooperation distinguishes itself by involving only underdeveloped countries, which have greater potential of mutual identification and of converging interests. Thus it does not come as a surprise that this practice has been increasingly gaining importance lately, as emergent countries have been experiencing greater international projection and meeting more favorable conditions to strengthen diplomatic ties, to promote trade partners (effective or potential) economic development and to increase, quantitatively and qualitatively, their influence on the international realm. In Brazil, the bureaucratic body responsible for the articulation of cooperation agreements is the Brazilian Cooperation Agency, under the Ministry of Foreign Relations. Its creation in 1987 followed the Brazilian democratization process, and within its lifetime it has gone under the command of seven presidential administrations as diverse on their political orientations as on the international challenges they had to face. However, the comprehension of the Brazilian Cooperation Agencys strategic role in Brazils foreign policy did not follow the increasing relevance attributed to it by the federal government in recent years. This paper intends to study Brazilian foreign policy and the strategic relevance of South-South cooperation in the last presidential administrations, based on data collected at the Brazilian Cooperation Agency.

Este trabalho busca estudar a alocação da assistência oficial para o desenvolvimento (ODA) do Japão no período de 1961 a 2015. A Agência de Cooperação Internacional Japonesa (JICA) tem apontado como motivações da ajuda externa o desenvolvimento econômico e a redução da pobreza em países menos desenvolvidos. A literatura em Relações Internacionais, no entanto, enxerga com ceticismo que os valores humanitários sejam, por si só, determinantes do nível de generosidade do doador, apontando para a importância de elementos domésticos, de fatores normativos internacionais e de considerações político-estratégicas na explicação dos programas de ajuda. Utilizando análise regressiva, esta pesquisa buscará evidências empíricas da importância relativa de diferentes variáveis explicativas da ajuda externa japonesa. Os resultados mostram que os interesses econômicos e político-estratégicos exercem maior influência sobre o programa de assistência do Japão que o nível de pobreza ou o regime democrático nos países beneficiários. Nossas estimativas indicam, ainda, que o Japão tende a concentrar a ajuda em países em desenvolvimento de renda relativamente mais alta, menos populosos e com menores índices de corrupção. / The purpose of this research is to study Japan\'s official development assistance (ODA) between 1961 and 2015. Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has cited economic development and poverty reduction in less-developed countries as reasons for providing external aid. However, literature on International Relations is skeptical of humanitarian motives being, on their own, the determinants of donor\'s level of generosity, pointing out the influence of domestic aspects, international statutes, and political and strategical considerations on explaining aid programs. By using regressive analysis, this research will look for empirical evidence of the relative significance of different variables that explain Japanese external aid. The results show that economic and political-strategic interests exert more influence over Japan\'s assistance program than the level of poverty or democratic regime in the beneficiary countries. Our estimates also show that Japan tends to focus aid on relatively higher income developing countries, less populous countries and countries with lower levels of corruption.

Este trabalho busca estudar a alocação da assistência oficial para o desenvolvimento (ODA) do Japão no período de 1961 a 2015. A Agência de Cooperação Internacional Japonesa (JICA) tem apontado como motivações da ajuda externa o desenvolvimento econômico e a redução da pobreza em países menos desenvolvidos. A literatura em Relações Internacionais, no entanto, enxerga com ceticismo que os valores humanitários sejam, por si só, determinantes do nível de generosidade do doador, apontando para a importância de elementos domésticos, de fatores normativos internacionais e de considerações político-estratégicas na explicação dos programas de ajuda. Utilizando análise regressiva, esta pesquisa buscará evidências empíricas da importância relativa de diferentes variáveis explicativas da ajuda externa japonesa. Os resultados mostram que os interesses econômicos e político-estratégicos exercem maior influência sobre o programa de assistência do Japão que o nível de pobreza ou o regime democrático nos países beneficiários. Nossas estimativas indicam, ainda, que o Japão tende a concentrar a ajuda em países em desenvolvimento de renda relativamente mais alta, menos populosos e com menores índices de corrupção. / The purpose of this research is to study Japan\'s official development assistance (ODA) between 1961 and 2015. Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) has cited economic development and poverty reduction in less-developed countries as reasons for providing external aid. However, literature on International Relations is skeptical of humanitarian motives being, on their own, the determinants of donor\'s level of generosity, pointing out the influence of domestic aspects, international statutes, and political and strategical considerations on explaining aid programs. By using regressive analysis, this research will look for empirical evidence of the relative significance of different variables that explain Japanese external aid. The results show that economic and political-strategic interests exert more influence over Japan\'s assistance program than the level of poverty or democratic regime in the beneficiary countries. Our estimates also show that Japan tends to focus aid on relatively higher income developing countries, less populous countries and countries with lower levels of corruption.

This work deals with the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship in the context of the African continent. First of all, it concentrates on the situation in Africa with respect to water and then on the importance of property rights in the resolving of the situation. Subsequently it discusses one of the common attempts to solve the water crisis, i.e. aid. The second part of the thesis is concerned with social entrepreneurship only. Firstly, from the theoretical point of view (definition, typology) and secondly, from the practical point of view (case studies of enterprises that are trying to push Africa closer to achieving the Millennium Development Goal of halving the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water).

This research project is designed to understand the relationship between states and Nongovernmental Organizations (NGOs), especially how they influence one another. In this study, I argue that the theoretical relationship between states' foreign policy behaviors and the behavior of NGO is dynamic and conditional, with the influence of NGOs on states' behaviors depending on the host states' regime type and the age of the influencing NGOs. I also argue that NGOs influence states' foreign policy behaviors toward other states both directly and indirectly, functioning as information providers, lobbying groups, agenda setters, and norm generators. By applying these theoretical arguments to the field of international development, the influence of NGOs on states' decisions about foreign aid is analyzed with the case of the United States. A new time-series cross-sectional dataset of the activities of US-based NGOs in developing countries is constructed by utilizing annual reports of NGOs, websites, and through personal communication with NGO officers. In addition, another new dataset is constructed about the number of New York Time articles. With constructed datasets, the quantitative studies are conducted. The quantitative studies show that as number of US-based NGO field operations in developing countries increase, that country is significantly more likely to receive higher amounts of aid from the United States. NGOs that have longer operations in developing countries are also more effective at lobbying the United States to provide more foreign aid. Furthermore, empirical analyses show that as number of US-based NGO activities increase in a country, the media coverage of that country increases. The qualitative analyses of NGOs' influence on states' foreign policy behaviors are also conducted. Interviews with NGO workers, governmental officials, and a reporter from the New York Times provide insight about how NGOs interact with the US government. In addition, these interviews show that NGOs function as information providers, lobbying groups, agenda setters, and norm generators. The theoretical understand of NGO-state relationships will contribute to the study of NGOs and NGOs' interaction with states. In addition, empirical analyses with newly constructed dataset and interviews with people in the field will become an important asset to social scientists in this field. The study also has a great potential to be expanded by including more NGO data, issue areas, and other countries' NGOs.

Both Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan were part of the former Soviet Union and were integrated into its political, economic and governance systems. As Union republics, they remained isolated from the outside world, with little direct interaction with external actors. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, both Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan established relations with a number of bilateral donors and multilateral development agencies. Despite their many similarities (e.g., social, cultural, religious, linguistic, geographic) and a shared history, the two countries’ post-Soviet development trajectories diverged dramatically. While Kyrgyzstan quickly launched transition reforms, liberalizing its economy and polity with support from external donors, Turkmenistan adopted a more gradual approach to political and economic reform and managed to minimize the influence of external actors in domestic affairs. This thesis analyzes the donor-recipient interaction in Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan across three sectors: governance, rural development, and environment. The analysis focuses on the management of aid through an anthropological, political economy-directed inquiry of relations between foreign donors and aid recipients at the micro level (daily interactions in managing aid). Collective action theory, evolutionary theory and adaptive behavior approaches are utilized to analyze the interaction on micro-level. However, the analysis is also situated in a broader, macro-level context of development and security priorities of the two states, for which the realist branch of the international relations theories is applied. Methodologically, the study is based on the triangulation of findings from various sources, including the content analysis of primary and secondary sources as well as the analysis of over 60 semi-structured interviews involving government and donor officials from the two countries. The thesis does not attempt to analyze whether development aid was effective. Instead, using similar analyses of aid interactions (Mosse, 2005; Swedlund, 2017), this thesis aims to investigate how aid interactions ‘happen’ (Wedel, 1998). While I agree that the sustainability of development aid is hampered by the inability of both donors and recipients to ‘make credible commitments’ (Swedlund, 2017), in this thesis I argue that aid interactions are also influenced by other factors, namely the political sensitivity of the sectors to which the aid is given (governance, rural development, environment), regime characteristics, availability or absence of natural resource-based revenues, and geopolitics. These factors, taken together, affect the aid bargaining process in important ways. The thesis makes a three-fold contribution to the existing knowledge on aid relations. First, it expands the knowledge on the agency of recipient governments by putting them at the core of the analysis. Second, it contributes to the very limited number of cross-sectoral and cross-country comparative studies on both aid management and on public policy making in general and in Central Asia in particular. Thirdly, it provides a detailed account of how development aid has been managed in Turkmenistan, a country on which no serious academic literature related to aid management has been produced to date.

Despite receiving large quantities of aid, many developing countries, especially the Least Developed Countries, have remained stagnant and became more aid-dependent. This grim reality provokes vigorous debate on the effectiveness of aid. This study re-examines the effectiveness of aid, focusing on the ongoing debate on the interactive effect of aid and policy conditionality on sustainable economic growth. A theoretical model of the aid-growth nexus was developed to explain why policy conditionality attached to aid may not always promote sustainable economic growth. Noticeable methodological weaknesses in the aid fungibility and aid-growth models have led to the construction of two macroeconometric models to tackle and reduce these weaknesses. The Lao People's Democratic Republic's economy for the 1978-2001 period has been used for a case study.It is argued that the quality of policy conditionality and the recipient country's ability to complete specified policy conditions are the main factors determining the effectiveness of aid. Completing the policy prescriptions contributes to a stable aid inflow. The aid-growth nexus model developed in this study shows that stable and moderate aid inflow boosts economic growth even when aid is fungible. However, failure to complete the policy conditionality owing to inadequate policy design and problems of policy mismanagement caused by lack of state and institutional capability in the recipient country triggers an unstable aid inflow. The model shows that unstable aid flows reduce capital accumulation and economic growth in the recipient country. These empirical findings reveal that policy conditionality propagated through the "adjustment programmes" has mitigated the side effects of aid fungibility and "Dutch disease" in the case of the Lao PDR. Preliminary success in implementing the policy conditions in the pre-1997 period led to a stable aid inflow and contributed to higher economic growth. This favourable circumstance, however, was impaired by unstable aid flow in the post-1997 period. The lack of state and institutional capacity in the Lao PDR and the inadequate policy design to deal with external shocks triggered the instability of aid inflow, which in turn exacerbated the negative effects of the Asian financial crisis on the Lao PDR's economy.

<p>The dissertation consists of three self-contained essays on Public Finance.</p><p>“News Droughts, News Floods and U.S. Disaster Relief” studies the mass media's influence on the U.S. government response to about 5,000 natural disasters in developing countries in 1968-2002. These disasters took around 63,000 lives and affected 125 million people per year. Given the huge losses involved, it is essential that disaster relief is provided to those most in need. We show that U.S. disaster relief depends on the occurrence of other newsworthy events at the time of the disaster, such as the Olympic Games or the O.J. Simpson Trial, which are obviously unrelated to need. We argue that the only plausible explanation for this is that relief decisions are driven by news coverage of disasters, and that this news coverage is crowded out by other newsworthy events.</p><p>“Fiscal Policy and Retirement in the Twentieth Century” proposes a model that explains the trend in labor supply among older workers through changes in fiscal policy, including social security. The essay re-introduces social security as a major determinant of retirement behavior, while simultaneously offering an explanation to the two main puzzles in the literature: (i) the small contemporary retirement elasticities and (ii) the drop in the retirement age prior to the introduction of social security.</p><p>“Sustainable Fiscal Policy and the Retirement Decision” concerns the sustainability of fiscal policy in aging economies and the retirement decision. The essay develops an applied general equilibrium model, where the retirement age is endogenous and current fiscal policy is a response to future demographic developments. Three policies are analyzed: (1) raising taxes (2) reducing the replacement rate and (3) raising the Full Retirement Age. All policies are found to have a substantial impact on retirement. Sustaining fiscal policy will result in falling interest rates, inducing a general delay in retirement. This general equilibrium effect on retirement can be substantially larger than the direct effect of changing social security incentives.</p>

Does foreign lobbying affect foreign aid? In this dissertation I provide compelling evidence the answer is yes. Prior scholarship has almost unequivocally focused on international bargaining as an exchange of public goods such as military, economic, or political concessions. Foreign lobbying represents a fundamentally different form of international bargaining. It is the exchange of a private good for an international policy concession. I develop a theory of foreign lobbying and foreign policy that views foreign policy formation as a function of political actors weighing public goods alongside the benefits they receive from foreign lobbyist contributions. I utilize a Heckman selection model to test this theory and find compelling evidence that foreign lobbying influences U.S. foreign aid allocations.