Foreign aid and voting in international organizations: Evidence from the IWC

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Dippel, Christian
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Los Angeles; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2015.08.012
• 发表日期: 2015
• 页码: 1-12
• 关键词: foreign aid; vote buying; international organizations

摘要

I use a unique dispute between major aid donors in the International Whaling Commission (WC) to investigate whether donor nations change their aid giving in response to changes in aid recipients' voting behavior inside international organizations (IOs). This relationship is difficult to pin down in most IOs because agenda items constantly change and donor coalitions fluctuate with them. I exploit the fact that the IWC has, on the one hand, seen two fixed aid donor blocs opposing each other for three decades over a single issue, but has on the other hand seen rich variation in both membership and voting behavior of aid recipient countries. Using an identification strategy that relates changes in bilateral aid to within-recipient variation in IWC voting-bloc affiliation and fixed cross-sectional variation in donors' voting bloc, the evidence suggests that Japan rewards joining the pro-whaling bloc, and that countries who recently experienced aid reductions from the three big anti-whaling donors - the U.S., the U.K., and France - are more likely to join the pro-whaling bloc. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.