Donor fragmentation and bureaucratic quality in aid recipients

By Stephen F. Knack, Aminur Rahman. 2004

540 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper analyzes the impact of donor fragmentation on the quality of government bureaucracy in aid-recipient nations. A formal model of a donor's decision to hire government administrators to manage donor-funded projects predicts that the number of administrators hired declines as the donor's share of other projects in the country increases, and as the donor's"altruism"(concern for the success of other donors'projects) increases. These hypotheses are supported by cross-country empirical tests using an index of bureaucratic quality available for aid-recipient nations over the 1982-2001 period. Declines in bureaucratic quality are associated with higher donor fragmentation (reflecting the presence of many donors, each with a small share of aid), and with smaller shares of aid coming from multilateral agencies, a proxy for donor"altruism."

Subfields: Development, Political Science and International Relations, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4d6a7dbc80ad9c3105b6a0d419ad810eea802c87

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Citations in the corpus

China & India as Africa's New Donors: The Impact of Aid on Development (2008, background): “Studies of sources of aid are also beginning to look at the twin issues of donor proliferation and coordination, raising questions about their effects on the capacity of states to set and follow their own development objectives (Knack and Rahman, 2004 ; Morss, 1984 ; Whittington and Calhoun, 1988”
Institutions and Foreign Direct Investment : China versus the Rest of the World (2009, unknown): “For details, see Knack and Rahman (2007).”
Trends and Issues in Development Aid (2007, background): “Knack and Rahman (2004) show that there can be substantial costs to donor fragmentation and to project proliferation in recipient countries.30 Their index of donor fragmentation measures the number of small aid donors per country.”
Are Aid Agencies Improving (2007, unknown): “Knack and Rahman (2004) confi rm some implications of these statements more rigorously.”
An Aid-Institutions Paradox? A Review Essay on Aid Dependency and State Building in Sub-Saharan Africa (2006, background): “…flows; fragmentation of donor efforts; project proliferation and duplication; conflicting or dominant donor agendas; competition for staff; and high administrative and oversight costs (Among many, see Cohen, 1992; Berg, 1993; Brautigam and Knack, 2004; Knack and Rahman, 2004; van de Walle, 2005).”
Does Conditionality Work? A Test for an Innovative US Aid Scheme (2011, unknown): “Similarly, Knack and Rahman (2007) attribute part of the Marshall Plan’s success in Europe to the presence of a single large donor.”
Developmental States in the New Millennium: Concepts and Challenges for a New Aid Agenda (2007, background): “In both cases, the US was by far the most dominant donor (Knack and Rahman, 2004), considering the region of essential strategic importance in the fight against communism.”
Aid with multiple personalities (2009, background): “Knack and Rahman (2004) find that bureaucratic quality decreases with donors’ fragmentation in Sub-Saharan Africa.”
The rise and fall of donor funding for advocacy NGOs: understanding the impact (2008, background): “For example, in 2002, ‘there were 25 official bilateral donors, 19 official multilateral donors, and about 350 international NGOs in Vietnam. . . accounting for over 8,000 development projects’ (Knack and Rahman 2004).”
Where Does the Money Go? Best and Worst Practices in Foreign Aid (2008, unknown): “(2006, p. 62), IMF and World Bank (2005, p. 171), and Knack and Rahman (2004) .”
Development Aid and Economic Growth: A Positive Long-Run Relation (2009, unknown): “…administrative capacity (Kanbur, 2000), crowding out private sector development (Bauer, 1976; Krauss, 1983), worsening bureaucratic quality (Knack & Rahman, 2007), weakening governance (Knack, 2000; Rajan & Subramanian, 2007), and lowering competitiveness through Dutch Disease effects…”
Does foreign aid harm political institutions (2015, background): “In part, this may reflect donor fragmentation, which has been shown to harm recipient-government bureaucratic quality (Knack and Rahman, 2007; Djankov et al., 2009).”
Counting Chickens when they Hatch: Timing and the Effects of Aid on Growth* (2012, unknown): “Other strands of this literature investigate aid effects beyond growth, such as schooling (Dreher et al., 2008) and governance (Knack and Rahman, 2007; Djankov et al., 2008).”