As a result of political antagonism across the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan has engaged in ¡§pragmatic diplomacy¡¨ since the end of 1980s in an attempt to reenter the international community and to establish more substantial official relations with foreign countries. As developing country, Taiwan has been donors of foreign aid with strong diplomatic incentives attached. Under the guideline of Taiwan¡¦s foreign policy goals, we have consistently chosen aid recipients that meet our diplomatic needs. In the 1990s, however, under the guidance of pragmatic diplomacy, Taiwan has made a concerted effort to reenter the international community and focused instead on improving state-to state relations. Official diplomacy and NGO activities may be "different approaches to the same ends," as the old Chinese saying goes, but they are fundamentally different. By mixing NGO functions with "track one" diplomacy, Taiwan has placed itself in an even worse position given the current international situation. NGO activities, however, are exchanges between civilians, not governments. In such unfavorable political antagonism across the Taiwan Strait circumstances, enabling Taiwan's NGOs -- with the help of official diplomacy -- to give full play to their functions overseas while building long-standing partnerships with foreign nations and people, should definitely be considered one of Taiwan's mid-to long-term strategic goals.

Thesis (M. Admin) -- University of the Western Cape, 2008. / Includes bibliographic references (leaves 64-67).

Poverty remains, despite efforts by the advanced economies to address it, a constant challenge in the world, particularly in Africa. The African continent has been riddled with poverty for decades. The factors that lead to and sustain poverty in African countries are varied and differ from country to country. However, historical factors, political instability, poor economic policies, a lack of education, disease, population growth, as well as climatic and environmental factors are key examples of some of these contributing factors. Today, Uganda is considered to be one of the poorer countries on the African continent, and for decades, despite large amounts of foreign aid inflow, there has been no significant improvement in relation to poverty reduction. The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether foreign aid contributed to economic growth in Africa, with Uganda serving as a case study. Using data from 1987 to 2011, the Autoregressive Distributed Lag was employed to test for the existence of the long-run Augmented Dickey-Fuller test for stationarity and the Ordinary Least Square regression analysis was used to test for the relationship between the variables. The results show that foreign aid has a significant negative effect on economic growth in the long run. The lesson for policymakers is that aid can improve economic growth in the long run, if and when facilitated by quality institutions. Other policy recommendations are included

This thesis identifies the gaps in the literature on foreign aid, and tries to fill some of them focusing particularly on Niger, a country that has received aid since its independence in 1960, yet remains one of the world's poorest. The work contributes to the literature in three ways: First, it addresses moral hazard: the relationship between the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the country is analysed through a historical case study. Niger's requests for assistance are accompanied by promises to undertake reforms; however, once aid is disbursed, these undertakings rarely materialize. Despite this record of poor (and deteriorating) compliance, IMF aid continues to flow, engendering perverse incentives and moral hazard. Secondly, it analyses whether aid is associated with poverty reduction. Aid is correlated with poverty, which is to be expected due to its pro-poor targeting nature. However, this study found increases in poverty associated with communities which were recipients of aid. To shed more light on this, households receiving aid were compared with those receiving no project assistance at all, and with households who benefited from non-aid based development projects. The results showed that changes in poverty levels among aid recipient households were not statistically different to those among households receiving no assistance. However, households benefiting from aid under-performed those who benefited from other projects. Thirdly, it explores whether aid brings utility to households through the provision of public goods. The results suggest that aid projects do help households. However, other sources of development projects are more efficient at doing so. Information is the key: it is a vital prerequisite for projects to address the needs of the population, and not all donors have the same information. Information can be obtained through co-funding projects with other donors, although there are also coordination costs. The models estimated allow the prediction of the benefits a project could provide to a household. Such predictive abilities could allow policymakers to coordinate donors' initiatives to maximize their effectiveness. However, at present Niger lacks the capacity to achieve such coordination. Furthermore, such an approach would involve having to reduce the least efficient donors to mere providers of finance (i.e. channel their resources through other donor types), a role they might not be willing to accept.

The first essay revisits the highly debated aid-policy-growth association with updated data. The results overturn Burnside and Dollar’s original findings by simply using new data over the same countries and years. Additional tests indicate that the original results are mainly sample driven. Marginal effects from the extended sample (1962-2013) provide some evidence that aid can promote growth in the presence of good policies. Post-Cold War (1990-2013) analysis, however, reveals that aid may decrease growth at any level of policy. The overwhelming majority of the results suggest aid conditional on policy is ineffective. This essay illustrates why the debate continues by showing that the results are highly sensitive to country-year selection, choice of methodology, instrumental variable selection, measurement of institutional quality, and growth rate measurement. Depending on a number of factors, both sides of the debate can be right. The second essay investigates the question “does foreign aid promote entrepreneurship?” This question has not been investigated in the existing literature. With a panel of 38 countries during 2005 to 2014, this research connects aid and recipient countries’ entrepreneurial activities. Aggregate aid tends to only boost necessity driven early-stage entrepreneurship and benefit low-income entrepreneurs. Aid to infrastructure promotes entrepreneurship driven by both opportunity and necessity motivations. It also incentivizes more entrepreneurs to compete with homogeneous products. Evidence also suggests that both aggregate aid and infrastructural aid discourages adoption of state of the art technologies, raises business failure rate, and is associated more with necessity-driven early-stage entrepreneurial activities for females. The third research examines the cross-country effectiveness of Aid for Trade (AfT) policy during 2004 to 2013. AfT targets trade liberalization through reducing trade costs and facilitating exports in recipient countries. This development policy has attracted much attention despite the doubts of effectiveness of foreign aid in general. Overall, this paper does not find evidence supporting AfT reducing trade costs or enlarging exports or imports. However, aid to economic infrastructure is positively related to service exports; it also connects aid recipient countries more closely with high-income donor countries via importing more merchandise from each other. At the same time, recipient countries import less from other low and middle income neighboring countries. In terms of sectoral AfT, aid to industry sector decreases manufactured imports, either due to substitution toward domestic manufactured products or because of higher tariffs of manufactured products.

This literary analysis focuses on the correlation between foreign aid and corruption. The “Capabilities Approach” by Amartya Sen is used to discuss how to, and who is responsible for, developing an ethically justified aid policy. Arguments and ideas from five different sources have been analyzed. The primary sources are African Development by Todd Moss, Corruption and Development by Georg Cremer, Lord of Poverty by Graham Hancock, The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly, and Internationalisation of corruption by Daniela Herrmann and Clare Fletcher. This study analyzes three questions. Firstly, does foreign aid affect the level of corruption, and how? Secondly, how do you measure development and justice? Thirdly, who is considered accountable? The results show that there is a connection between aid and corruption and that the aid agencies together with the governments have the primary responsibility to improve the policy and reconstruct the organizations. The policy should focus on enhancing the quality of life of the individual.

This study attempts to ascertain the role of the World Bank and its problematical issues in Balkan countries. The foreign aid holds a key impact in these economies, but on the other hand it embraces a controversial aspect. The contradictory role of the World Bank lies in aid ineffectiveness at reducing poverty and sustaining economic growth. The foreign aid inflows did not manage to fulfill its objectives efficiently, since they created income inequalities in the region favoring distinctive economies. Corruption and bad-governmental management would expand the controversially further. Additionally, the study analyzes the impact of aid on economic growth empirically using a panel data set comprising of five Balkan economies during 2000-2010 period. We find negative and significant evidence of aid impact on growth. Moreover, the relation between governance and growth resulted positive. Results display a clear framework of aid ineffectively across the region. The Balkan countries should therefore focus on a better effective management of the World Bank aid to reduce poverty, income inequality and to achieve the economic growth.

In 2000, the World Bank estimated that 2.8 billion people lived on incomes of less than $2.00 a day. Meanwhile about forty percent of the world's population endured conflict, most of them from the same subset. The implementation of foreign assistance to mitigate poverty and conflict is a key focus of politicians, bureaucrats and social scientists. The goal of this research is to discover relationships among foreign aid, conflict, and socio-economic development, and assess the implications. Other evaluations either approach this issue from a hedonistic, theoretical standpoint, or follow a stylized project evaluation method. This research is intended to create a bridge between the two approaches by: 1) proposing theoretical models of assistance and conflict accounting for current status quo, and 2) introducing novel empirical methods to analyze the causes and effects of development, intervention and conflict. The research begins with a comparative analysis of different schools of thought concerning foreign intervention, conflict and development. Contemporary philosophies and policies provide the basis for assumptions and inquiries addressed in the latter part of this dissertation. The review is followed by a critique of relevant data and their sources. A theoretical model of foreign assistance allocation and its possible impacts on conflict is proposed. The theoretical model is verified through an empirical examination using inductive casual inference methods. It is concluded that under current mandates and policies, aggregate foreign assistance has no effect on conflict and development in poor countries. Research is then directed toward analyzing the effect of foreign assistance on conflict, disaggregated by sector. Agricultural and food security assistance were identified as the most effective method of mitigating conflict. The next segments of research concentrate on agricultural development. A model of agricultural development is proposed that will promote food security and mitigate conflict. In the last analysis, a direct causal relationship is found between commodity prices and conflict. Findings are summarized in the conclusion, and recommendations are provided for policy re-evaluations.

The objectives of foreign aid are closely associated with the global political and economic issues during the last 60 years. In recent years foreign aid flows have been considerably influenced by international terrorism. In this paper I attempt to investigate whether and how sectoral aid has affected international conflicts and intra-country violence. The analysis is initiated by case studies. I use graphical analysis to examine the rationale and disbursements of sectoral foreign aid to Iraq and Afghanistan from 2002 to 2010. It is discovered that aid for agriculture and food are extremely low in these conflict areas. Then I use a comprehensive panel data to show the relationships between conflicts/violence and sectoral foreign aid covering 123 developing countries from 2002 to 2010. It shows that agricultural aid can significantly reduce conflict, and aid for food security can significantly mitigate violence. Aid for some sectors will increase conflict/violence. Finally I use directed acyclic graphs (DAG) to present preliminary results on the structure of causality among conflicts/violence and sectoral aid, showing that aid to government is positively associated with both conflict and violence.

Three studies on foreign aid, rent-seeking, and economic growth in sub-Saharan Africa are presented. The first study examines the possible simultaneity that may exist between a donor’s provision of aid and the rentseeking (corruption) activities in the recipient country. Does the amount of aid depend on the lack of corruption in a country? Simultaneously, does the level of corruption depend on the amount of aid and the type of donor? The main goals of this paper are to examine whether such simultaneity exists and whether the impact of aid depends on the type of the donor, either multilateral or bilateral. The second study extends the first model by incorporating an additional equation for GDP per capita. It examines whether simultaneity exists between the three variables: foreign aid, corruption, and GDP per capita and whether the relationship depends upon the source of the foreign aid. Adding GDP per capita as an endogenous variable will provide another key to understanding the lack of long-term effectiveness for foreign aid in sub-Saharan Africa. The third and final study uses a fixed effects model to examine the relationship between foreign aid and the level of corruption in sub-Saharan Africa. Accounting for fixed effects allows me to examine whether unobserved characteristics of recipient countries play a role in explaining the impact of aid on corruption.