Although humanitarian need appears to be a major determinant of emergency relief payments, the results of this study suggest that political and strategic factors play a crucial role in emergency aid allocation as well.
It finds that on average, donor governments favour smaller, geographically closer and oil exporting countries, and display significant biases in favour of politically less aligned countries as well as toward their former colonies. Using an original data set covering 270 natural disasters to analyse the determinants of international emergency aid, the study tests and rejects the independence of donors’ said decisions, finding strong evidence for bandwagon effects in humanitarian assistance.
Key findings:
- Donor governments are on average significantly more generous toward geographically closer, politically less affine and oil exporting countries. There are significant biases in favor of former colonies, and evidence for herding in the international aid process. Even though the extent of the various biases varies significantly across donor countries, the results suggest that bilateral, and especially political factors are at least as important in emergency aid as the actual humanitarian need associated with natural disasters.
- From a policy perspective, the findings do not necessarily imply that government agencies behave sub-optimally. Even though the aid patterns detected in this paper stand in stark contrast to the official international commitment to a purely humanitarian use of emergency aid, discretionary choice in the allocation of aid may well reflect the preferences or interests of underlying populations and electorates.
- Nevertheless, recent developments in the international political sphere indicate that at least some countries have recognised the need for improvements in the allocation of humanitarian aid. In a first meeting in 2003, 16 of the major donors joined forces in the Good Humanitarian Donorship Initiative working toward more efficiency and higher degrees of accountability within humanitarian assistance.
- In a related effort, former UN Secretary- General Kofi Annan officially launched the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) as a central tool to provide immediate and impartial humanitarian aid to regions experiencing humanitarian crisis in March of 2006. Both initiatives appear as steps into the right direction from a humanitarian policy perspective.
