Darlings and Orphans: Interactions across Donors in International Aid

Abstract

Abstract We examine how the bilateral aid flows from an individual donor to a recipient depend on the aid flows from all other bilateral and multilateral donors to that recipient. Thereby, we assess to what extent issues including donor coordination, free‐riding, selectivity, specialization, and common donor interests drive bilateral aid allocations. We find that others’ bilateral flows lead to a significant increase in aid flows from a particular donor, but primarily within a given year. The effects are particularly pronounced for large donors and so‐called “darling” recipients. Overall, the results suggest that herding is a dominant feature of aid inter‐relationships.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 41 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.