Foreign aid, for decades used by despotic governments to line their pockets and finance uneconomic projects, is now being used by democratically elected governments to buy votes and remain in power.
That's the message from a recent study by Ryan S. Jablonski, an assistant professor at the London School of Economics and Political Science, in a study titled, "How Aid Targets Votes: The Impact of Electoral Incentives on Foreign Aid Distribution." By combining newly available electoral data with foreign aid data, Jablonski shows that "electoral biases influence aid spending in many, if not most, aid-dependent states."
Examples abound. In Zimbabwe, citizens looking for food aid before the 2005 election were turned away if they couldn't prove they were supporters of Robert Mugabe's African National Union-Patriotic Front. In Ethiopia, shortly before the 2010 election, the government of Prime Minister Meles Zenawi reportedly held back the distribution of foreign aid -- agricultural supplies and food aid -- from families that failed to vote for his party, the Ethiopian People's Revolutionary Democratic Front. And in Pakistan, foreign emergency relief offered in the wake of flooding in 2010 was allegedly withheld from opposition strongholds.
This latest abuse of foreign aid follows the West's trend over the last two decades to tie aid to democratic reforms. More and more, poor countries are holding elections to qualify for foreign aid.
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