Turkish power contestation with the United Arab Emirates: an empirical assessment of official development assistance

Abstract

Turkey's post-Arab Spring regional rivalry with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) influences the allocation of its Official Development Assistance (ODA). Our paper provides a comprehensive comparison of Turkish and UAE’s ODA on global and regional levels. To understand the effects of power struggle on Turkish ODA, we employ a time-series cross-sectional model, taking Turkey’s annual ODA allocations as our dependent variable, and the UAE's global and regional ODA levels as our independent variables. We observe that Africa emerges as the main region where the rivalry between Turkey and the UAE intensifies. Based on our regression analysis covering 2000–2020, our findings demonstrate the limits of religious-cultural explanations of foreign aid, suggesting donors' geopolitical interests playing a higher role. We find out that Turkey allocates more ODA to Muslim countries, yet its main motivation is not based on religious-cultural affinity. Our case studies on Egypt and Somalia demonstrate competition between Turkey and the UAE for regional influence. We contribute to the existing foreign aid literature in two critical ways: First, we provide a comprehensive regional analysis of Turkey's foreign aid behavior, as each geography has its own unique geopolitical dynamics. Second, we show that religious proximity is insufficient to explain Turkey's ODA distribution, based on the existence of competing donors throughout multiple geopolitical crises.