Previous research has not specified the circumstances under which foreign aid may increase the probability of armed conflict. The purpose of this dissertation is to address this gap by employing a theoretical framework in which foreign aid produces incentives for a rent-seeking scramble among elites. A set of conditions affecting the likelihood of armed conflict are identified and tested on global data in a series of statistical analyses. Paper I argues and finds that foreign aid increases the probability of armed conflict in states where there are few constraints on executive power, allowing for a scramble for rents. Paper II proposes and finds a threshold effect of aid, such that the likelihood of armed conflict increases only when aid has reached a certain level. Paper III suggests and demonstrates that sudden negative changes in aid flows enhance the risk of armed conflict as well as coup attempts, as aid shortfalls accelerate distributional conflict over aid rents. Paper IV claims and shows that civil wars are less likely to be terminated by settlement in the form of elections when conflict parties are dependent on rents. In sum, this dissertation contributes by theoretically specifying and empirically identifying conditions under which foreign aid increases the probability of armed conflict.

<p>The effectiveness of foreign aid in bringing economic and social development is mired in controversy. However, despite the controversial debates on its effectiveness, poor countries of the world have been receiving and using aid as a leverage to relieve themselves from development constraints they faced. Ethiopia is no exception amongst developing countries. Since the time it joined the World Bank group in 1945, foreign capital inflow has remained an important source of revenue for the government. This paper examines the fiscal impact of aid inflow into Ethiopia using time series data for the period 1975-2005. The empirical findings reveal that inflow of foreign aid influences public decision on revenue and expenditure patterns. The result shows that a larger proportion of aid is allocated to capital expenditure and that only a small proportion goes to recurrent expenditure. There is a strong positive association between aid inflow and capital expenditure. The finding also shows that, while a very weak negative association exists between aid and taxation effort, aid and borrowing are used as alternative source of finance.</p>

The dissertation consists of three self-contained essays on Public Finance. “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. “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. “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.

This study is motivated by the needs to critically reflect upon development aid. Foreign aid work has since the 1950s expanded to become a large and complex enterprise, where every country is either an aid donor or aid recipient, or being both. Foreign aid has always been viewed as a moral issue and the benefits have been contested and challenged. There are few voices that are questioning the provision of emergency aid, however, development aid have had its critics since the modern idea was raised of providing aid continuously. The question is whether it could ever produce the desired effect. It has also been criticized because of the way that decisions about who to give it to are influenced by political, strategic and commercial interests of donors. The purpose of this essay was to review the ideas that international aid workers have of development aid. This essay is based on qualitative data, where I have interviewed seven respondents about their experiences of working with international development aid. The empirical data has been interpreted using development theories specifically theories of social capital and human resources, rationality and the ideas of empowerment. The conclusions of this essay shows that it is very complex to talk about any obvious results of development aid, though it all depends on the significance of development. What where noticeable in this essay where that hardly anyone of respondents was committed to national aid work of any kind before they took the assignment. Since they got home, most of the respondents were devoted to national aid work. In order to generate help to self-help, the result shows that essential for development aid is cooperation.

Twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation has struggled to construct a new foreign policy paradigm in a world that is no longer bipolar. Instead of the Cold War era arms stockpiles, Moscow has signed multiple Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START), and instead of physically taking over neighboring territories, increasing diplomacy and economic incentives have become Moscow’s primary tool to garner and maintain influence in its near abroad. Soft power initiatives, that can all roughly fit into a foreign aid model, from the Russian Federation to the near abroad come in different forms: oil subsidies, aid in kind, and direct financial investment. The Russian Federation has used all three of these strategies in Ukraine after the fall of the Soviet Union in an attempt to keep the country in its sphere of influence. The use of foreign aid, be it oil subsides, aid in kind, or direct financial aid, all work towards the same goal of promoting Russian policies and interests in the near abroad. Ukraine, with its unique political, cultural and geographical importance, demonstrates the new struggle between Russia and the West. The struggle’s main actors are the Russian Federation against the eastern half of NATO and the EU, and the conclusion is unclear. Foreign aid and soft power are now playing a critical role in the outcome.

By adopting the Policy for Global Development (PGD) in 2003 the Swedish parliament established gender mainstreaming as a goal in development cooperation policy, thereby emphasizing women’s role as agents of empowerment in development. This has not always been the case. During most of the history of Swedish foreign aid women issues have been handled separately and development policy mainly based on a male perspective. A lot of research has focused on trends in the global debate over how to better integrate women in development process, but much less academic attention has focused on how Swedish development policy has addressed the issue and how women have been referred to in development policy since the origin of Swedish foreign aid. According to the theories of critical discourse analysis (CDA) our written and spoken language influence our view of the reality and how we understand society. Following that logic, how women are referred to in Swedish development policy influence how women are perceived by the actors of development cooperation. Through a critical discourse analysis of official Swedish governmental documents concerning foreign aid, such as government bills and letters of appropriation, this study aims to detect discourses of Swedish development policy regarding women in developing countries. Furthermore it aims to understand how these discourses have related to the global debate about women’s role in development. This study observes six discourses of women in developing countries in the material: Women as passive recipient, agent of empowerment, the savior, motherhood-women as mothers, the other woman, and the man as the norm. The analysis shows Sweden’s development policies following the global discussions fairly coherently during much of the period, with 80s as the only possible exception.

In the early 2000s when several Central and East European countries (CEECs) negotiated their accession to the European Union (EU), they introduced foreign aid policy despite most of them being aid recipient countries at the time. This thesis seeks to explain the evolution of foreign aid policy in two Central and Eastern European countries that took divergent paths in adopting the policy, Slovenia and Latvia. While Slovenia evolved into a relatively active donor country among the CEECs, Latvia’s aid policy developed relatively slowly and aid allocations were smaller. The thesis approaches this subject from the perspective of the ‘Europeanisation East’ literature that seeks to explain policy adoption in the CEECs in terms of EU influence. The literature is divided on how to explain the policy adoption processes in the CEECs. Rationalists, on the one hand, stress the role played by external incentives, in particular the conditions the EU imposed on the CEECs for them to be admitted to the EU, known as EU conditionality. Rationalists also note the role of domestic veto players who can delay or even stop adoption of the policy if it incurs high adoption costs upon them. Constructivists, on the other hand, explain policy adoption in terms of identification and social influence, policy resonance, or the presence of influential norm entrepreneurs. In an important study, Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier (2005) concluded that most of the policy adoption processes can be explained by the overwhelming influence of EU conditionality, thus downplaying constructivist explanations. This thesis examines whether their finding can be applied to the adoption of foreign aid policy in the preaccession period (1998-2004). It focuses on the role of EU as well as domestic factors in the policy adoption processes. It then explores what factors account for further developments in the policy adoption processes in the period after the CEECs acceded to the EU (2004-2010). The empirical basis of this study consists of a series of interviews with policy makers and civil society representatives in the two countries. The findings in these interviews have been checked against and triangulated with an encompassing examination of policy documents and archival material. The main findings about the pre-accession period indicate that EU conditionality indeed played an important role in foreign aid policy adoption, but so did identification and social influence. Hence policy adoption costs and the efforts of veto players could not delay policy adoption. In the post-accession period, it is argued here, the further policy adoption processes can largely be explained by identification and social influence. Nevertheless, veto players and adoption costs, as well as policy resonance, did emerge as constraining factors in the policy processes. All in all, the thesis argues that the policy adoption processes can be explained best by a combination of both Constructivist and Rationalist theories and that role of domestic factors should not be neglected in research into EU influence on the new member states.

Foreign aid is the subject in development economics that created controversies about its influences on the economy of the recipient countries. This study is an attempt to explain the effects that aid may have on trade, with a focus on the trade costs associated with the creation of business ties. Tied aid creates incentives for the developing countries to keep positive trading relationships with their donors, mainly because of the diminishing trad-ing costs associated with long term contacts. Subsequently, programs related to infra-structure and trade enforcement have been launched, that work towards the integration of the Least Developing Countries into the world economy.This study includes the analysis of the trade flows and foreign aid disbursement be-tween the “Group of Seven” countries (G7) and the Least Developing Countries, for a time span of 22 years (1988-2009). The results show that aid does have a significant ef-fect on the trade flows between the developed and developing countries. The explana-tion to this is related to the trading costs and the infrastructure development that tends to diminish the costs linked to distance- and border-related issues, and the sunk costs of market research and entry. In accordance, the distance coefficient is smaller after 1997, as result of decreased trade costs and increased export flows from recipients to donors.

Drawing upon formal modeling, cross-national statistical analysis, and in-depth case studies, this dissertation explores the relationship between patterns of government revenue generation and political regime stability. Considering both tax and non-tax revenue (the latter of which includes foreign aid and revenue from state-owned natural resource enterprises), and building on recent redistributive theories of regime change, I use formal modeling to generate testable hypotheses about the impact of non-tax revenue on regime dynamics in both democratic and authoritarian regimes. <em>The central prediction is that rises (falls) in non-tax resources increase (decrease) the stability of authoritarian and democratic regimes, by reducing (increasing) redistributional conflicts in society.</em> I provide evidence supporting the implications of the theory for both redistribution and regime stability, drawing upon cross-national time-series statistical analysis as well as in-depth examination of three theoretically important cases: Bolivia, Mexico, and Kenya.The research has important implications for three bodies of literature. First, it advances the broad literature on the political economy of redistribution. The existing literature has generally assumed that government revenues are raised solely by taxation, the source of redistributional conflict. I demonstrate that this is not a plausible assumption---non-tax revenue makes up about a quarter of government revenue on average, and in some countries represents the large majority of government revenue---and that in fact non-tax revenue systematically decreases redistribution.Second, building on this insight, I advance the literature on democratization by developing a theory of how government revenues---both their size and their source---factor into regime change. This work builds on and extends recent influential works that have focused on formally modeling the distributional dynamics underlying regime transitions. Finally, the research sheds light on commonalities between literatures studying different areas of the world. In particular, it argues that there are similarities between insights developed in the literature on the <em>"rentier"</em> state---principally regarding how oil revenues affect regime dynamics---and those developed in the literature on foreign aid and political regimes. The reason is that oil revenues and aid are significant examples of a broader set of resources---non-tax revenues---whose importance has been underappreciated. / Dissertation

Harvard University professor Joseph Nye divided a country¡¦s comprehensive national power into hard power and soft power. A country¡¦s national interest ovelap each country and the interaction with countries become more frequent and close under the globalization. A country not only pursueds its own hard power, but develops its soft power. With soft power has become the core value in the international society, the effect of soft power has become the key stratergy to a country¡¦s foreign relations. Moreover, soft power has been China¡¦s foreign relations strategy. This paper analyzes how China uses foreign aid policy and Confucius Institute to achieve the efficacy of soft power. To analyze China¡¦s foreign aid policy and Confucius Institute¡¦s overall arrangement stratergy, and compare the different efficacy of soft power of the role of foreign aid policy and Confucius Institute. China¡¦s economic grows fast since 1978, but how to avoid the other countries fear and misgiving is a big challeange for Chinese government. Chinese government emphasizes peaceful development and develops a country¡¦s soft power to build more advantageous international environment.