IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/kap/itaxpf/v8y2001i5p693-703.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Samaritan's Dilemma and the Effectiveness of Development Aid

Author

Listed:
  • Karl Pedersen

    ()

Abstract

Contributing to the alleviation of poverty in recipient countries is one of the main goals of most aid organizations. In this paper the following question is asked: could it be the case that altruistic aid organizations are counter-productive in the sense that their activities may cause the extent of poverty to increase or the relative income distribution to worsen? The answer is yes and the reason is simply that recipient governments adjust in order to qualify for aid. It is shown that if recipient governments perceive themselves as being engaged in a competition for aid and/or if the aggregate aid budget is endogenous, then the incentive problems may become particularly severe. Copyright Kluwer Academic Publishers 2001

Suggested Citation

  • Karl Pedersen, 2001. "The Samaritan's Dilemma and the Effectiveness of Development Aid," International Tax and Public Finance, Springer;International Institute of Public Finance, vol. 8(5), pages 693-703, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:kap:itaxpf:v:8:y:2001:i:5:p:693-703
    DOI: 10.1023/A:1012839126094
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1023/A:1012839126094
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Maizels, Alfred & Nissanke, Machiko K., 1984. "Motivations for aid to developing countries," World Development, Elsevier, vol. 12(9), pages 879-900, September.
    2. Lindbeck, Assar & Weibull, Jorgen W, 1988. "Altruism and Time Consistency: The Economics of Fait Accompli," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 96(6), pages 1165-1182, December.
    3. Pedersen, Karl R, 1996. " Aid, Investment and Incentives," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 98(3), pages 423-438.
    4. Trumbull, William N & Wall, Howard J, 1994. "Estimating Aid-Allocation Criteria with Panel Data," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 104(425), pages 876-882, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Torsvik, Gaute, 2005. "Foreign economic aid; should donors cooperate?," Journal of Development Economics, Elsevier, vol. 77(2), pages 503-515, August.
    2. Blouin, Max & Pallage, Stéphane, 2009. "Addressing the food aid curse," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 104(1), pages 49-51, July.
    3. Hagen, Rune Jansen, 2004. "Foreign Aid and Domestic Politics Implications for Aid Selectivity," Working Papers 04-12, Cornell University, Center for Analytic Economics.
    4. Amegashie, J. Atsu & Ouattara, Bazoumanna & Strobl, Eric, 2007. "Moral Hazard and the Composition of Transfers: Theory with an Application to Foreign Aid," MPRA Paper 3158, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 06 May 2007.
    5. Blouin, Max & Pallage, Stéphane, 2016. "Warlords, famine and food aid: Who fights, who starves?," European Journal of Political Economy, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 18-38.
    6. Dalgaard, Carl-Johan, 2008. "Donor policy rules and aid effectiveness," Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Elsevier, vol. 32(6), pages 1895-1920, June.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    aid; development; poverty;

    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:kap:itaxpf:v:8:y:2001:i:5:p:693-703. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Sonal Shukla) or (Rebekah McClure). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    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.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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.

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

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.