IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/sprchp/978-3-540-79247-5_9.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Foreign aid and rent-seeking

In: 40 Years of Research on Rent Seeking 2

Author

Listed:
  • Jakob Svensson

    (World Bank)

Abstract

Why has the macroeconomic impact of foreign aid seemingly been so poor? Is there a relationship between the widespread level of corruption and other types of rent-seeking activities and concessional assistance? To answer these questions we provide a simple game-theoretic rent-seeking model. The model has a number of implications. First, under certain circumstances, an increase in government revenue lowers the provision of public goods. Second, the mere expectation of aid may suffice to increase rent dissipation and reduce productive public spending. This result may be reversed, however, if the donor community can enter into a binding policy commitment. We also provide some preliminary empirical evidence in support of the hypothesis that foreign aid and windfalls are on average associated with higher corruption in countries more likely to suffer from competing social groups. We find no evidence that the donors systematically allocate aid to countries with less corruption.

Suggested Citation

  • Jakob Svensson, 2000. "Foreign aid and rent-seeking," Springer Books, in: Roger D. Congleton & Kai A. Konrad & Arye L. Hillman (ed.), 40 Years of Research on Rent Seeking 2, pages 165-189, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-79247-5_9
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-79247-5_9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Corruption; Foreign aid; Rent-seeking;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D72 - Microeconomics - - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making - - - Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior
    • F35 - International Economics - - International Finance - - - Foreign Aid

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:sprchp:978-3-540-79247-5_9. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.