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" Essays on Foreign Aid and Governance "
Watkins, James Mitchell
Mosley, Layna
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Latin Dissertation
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English
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| Record Number
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1053085
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| Doc. No
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TL52202
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| Main Entry
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Watkins, James Mitchell
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| Title & Author
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Essays on Foreign Aid and Governance\ Watkins, James MitchellMosley, Layna
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| College
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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| Date
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2019
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| student score
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2019
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| Note
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148 p.
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| Abstract
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This dissertation is comprised of three distinct essays that generally examine the impact of foreign aid on political and economic governance in recipient countries. The first essay of the dissertation develops a game-theoretic model that predicts that Chinese development assistance has a negative effect on recipient country compliance with Western aid conditionality. Using project-level data from 42 Sub-Saharan African countries, I find strong empirical evidence that increased Chinese aid within a recipient country decreases the likelihood of compliance with conditions specified in World Bank project agreements. The second essay of the dissertation examines the effect of foreign aid on the incidence of political budget cycles in expenditures and taxation in developing countries. I theorize that aid increases the likelihood of political budget cycles by increasing the value of holding office, obscuring fiscal transparency, and creating a soft budget constraint that discourages fiscal discipline. Using panel data for 70+ developing democracies from 1990-2012, the empirical analysis finds that political budget cycles in expenditures are statistically and substantively larger as foreign aid within a country increases. Contrary to my hypothesis, the analysis reveals no significant relationship between aid and tax revenue prior to elections. The third essay of the dissertation investigates the effect of foreign aid projects on institutional trust using geolocated data on aid projects and Afrobarometer survey results from Nigeria, Senegal, and Uganda. Drawing from institutional theories of trust, I theorize that foreign aid projects harm institutional trust by lowering citizens' evaluations of government performance and administrative competence. Using a spatial difference-in-difference strategy, the empirical results find that active aid projects are associated with decreased trust in the president, parliament, and local government council. The results also indicate that completed aid projects are associated with declines in institutional trust, although the effect size constitutes a statistically and substantively smaller change compared to active projects.
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| Descriptor
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International relations
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Mosley, Layna
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
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