Analysis of the Sub-National Distribution of Foreign Aid in Sub-Saharan Africa: Patterns, Institutions and Effects on Regional Inequality

Chapter 1 provides an introduction and preliminary comparisons of economic and human development indicators to present current differences in levels of development between different countries grouped by their income level. Since World War II foreign aid has proved to be one of the main instruments for the developed countries to promote and increase economic development in less developed parts of the world. Chapter 2 will give a brief chronological overview of economic theories about economic growth and development and highlight recent approaches in development research. It will be shown that the focus of development policies has changed several times since its emergence. Given positive and negative growth experiences in developing countries, the development research literature is still inconclusive concerning the effects of development assistance and foreign aid on economic development. The gap in economic performance between developing and developed countries remains considerable, even in the face of constant flows of foreign aid and continuously changing policy prescriptions addressing pressing issues and obstacles of development. Chapter 3 uses sub-nationally disaggregated data to assess the importance of recipient countries' governance on the allocation of aid projects within recipient countries. The results show that incumbent presidents' birth regions do not signiffcantly attract more project aid than other regions in a country. Accounting for levels of governance in recipient countries does not change the results. On the other hand, capital city regions appear to attract more project aid. Higher levels of governance seem to have a negative effect on the allocation of aid projects in capital city regions, which might be driven by clientelistic and corrupt motives of political decision makers. Considering the results from the research literature and from Chapter 3 one may wonder how different sub-national distributional patterns of aid projects and foreign aid influence regional and spatial inequalities ...