Abstract
The intensification of the international migration flows sent by developing countries and received by developed countries is ‘reshaping’ the aid map of the 21st century. However, to date the influence of immigration on the geographical distribution of aid has been little studied. This paper proposes a general framework for analysing the extent to which immigration flows affect the allocation of Official Development Assistance (ODA). We apply this model to the case of Spain (a country that, in a short time, became one of the top-ten bilateral donors and one of the main recipients of immigration in Europe) during the period from 1998 to 2009 (prior to the current economic crisis, which has slowed down the immigration flows temporarily and reduced the ODA budget drastically). The estimations reveal that immigration is relevant both to the selection of aid partners, and to the allocation of aid quotas, thus ‘reshaping’ the geographical strategy of Spain’s public aid.
Highlights
The allocation of international public aid should be coherent with the officially proclaimed international development agenda
We propose a general framework of analysis, and we apply it to the Spanish Official Development Assistance (ODA) allocation case, in the period 1998-2009
We propose a general framework for analyzing the influence of immigrations flows in the geographical allocation of a donor country that follows the pioneer contribution of Dudley and Montmarquette (1976) by focusing the analysis on the economic behaviour of the decision-makers responsible for aid allocation
Summary
The allocation of international public aid should be coherent with the officially proclaimed international development agenda. The ‘political motive’ of paying attention to the increasing political influence of immigrants’ lobbies in the donor country and alleviating the internal tensions that arise from the entry of uncontrolled immigration Despite this general neglect of the international migration flows, three notable exceptions have considered the role of immigration in the aid allocation decisions: Lahiri and Raimondos-Moller (2000) developed a political-economic model of aid allocation based solely on the immigrants’ political influence on the donor country. The whole process of aid allocation is structured in two consecutive decisions – given a predetermined aid budget–, which clearly consider the potential influence of immigration flows: firstly, the donor Government chooses the group of aid-partner countries based on the ‘attraction’ that each country exerts over him ( computing the selection probabilities described in equation [4]). This specification allows us to estimate separately both decisions and to consider a different set of explanatory variables in each decision stage
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