Simone Dietrich
Foreign aid critics, supporters, donors and recipients agree on the need for a more effective aid policy. Yet considerable variation exists in how donor governments allocate foreign aid. Why do some OECD donor countries choose to withhold the majority of government-to-government aid in response to bad governance in the aid recipient country, while others continue to provide substantial amounts through this bilateral aid channel? Simone Dietrich’s research explores cross-donor and cross-temporal variation in aid delivery tactics.
While at CESifo in July, Ms Dietrich continued to work on this topic. Her argument posits that cross-donor differences exist, in part, because aid delivery tactics are conditioned by national orientations about the appropriate role of the state in public goods provision. Countries that place high premiums on market efficiency (e.g. US, UK, Sweden) will pursue aid delivery tactics that increase the likelihood that aid reaches the intended beneficiaries of services. They systematically work around corrupt and inefficient governments and deliver aid through non-state development actors. However, such tactics are costly for aid officials from political economies that emphasise a strong state in goods provision (e.g. France, Germany, Japan) insofar as a bypass undermines the ability of the state to lead long-term development efforts. Ms Dietrich draws on cross-national data on foreign aid delivery mechanisms as well as on survey experimental data from cross-country mass public and elite surveys to test her argument.
Simone Dietrich is Assistant Professor in Political Science at the University of Missouri at Columbia. She completed her PhD in Political Science at Pennsylvania State University and served as a postdoctoral research associate at Princeton University. Prior to completing her doctorate, Ms Dietrich worked as an aid practitioner for the OESCE and the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Bosnia and Herzegovina.