EA - There is little (good) evidence that aid systematically harms political institutions by ryancbriggs

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: There is little (good) evidence that aid systematically harms political institutions, published by ryancbriggs on September 13, 2023 on The Effective Altruism Forum.Sometimes in discussions of foreign aid or charity I see people raise the point that aid might do good directly, such as by providing a health service, but that it might cause harm indirectly, for example by allowing an incompetent or corrupt state to continue existing without being forced to become better by harsh economic realities. These arguments come up in conversation, and also in books by the likes of Angus Deaton or Larry Temkin. Recently, Martha Nussbaum brought up these concerns. They're worth taking seriously. Thankfully, political scientists and economists have in fact looked at them (somewhat) seriously.In this post I'm going to tell you a tiny bit about me, explain the institutional criticism of aid in a bit more detail, and then explain the results of two papers testing this relationship. I'll also explain a tiny bit about the limitations of this kind of work. The upshot of all this is that we have very little strong evidence that aid systematically harms political institutions. My best personal guess is that while aid can sometimes have medium-sized positive or negative effects on politics in recipient countries in specific cases, on average right now and in the recent past it has very small effects in either direction.All About MeI'm a political scientist by training and most of my teaching is in a development studies department. When I was considering grad school, I was really interested in political accountability and the ways that "easy money" like oil can distort political relationships. My reading of recent history suggested to me that getting oil before having representative institutions meant locking in autocratic rule. I thought about studying oil states but then somewhat unrelatedly I tried living in Cairo for about half a year and found it quite challenging culturally - so I figured studying oil states was probably not going to work for me. My next idea was thinking about aid. In a lot of ways it seemed similar to oil: it was "easy money" for governments that let them provide goods or services to their citizens without taxing them. In many very poor countries it was also a large flow in terms of government expenditure or GDP. I wrote my big undergrad paper on this.While doing so I read the work of Deborah Brautigam on this topic and then I went to do my PhD with her.Aid and institutions in theoryThe "aid harms institutions" story isn't dumb. It makes internal sense, and the early (cross-sectional) evidence that we had on it sometimes suggested harm. There are so many ways that aid could harm institutions or governance in recipient countries. It could do so by acting like oil. This primarily means allowing governments to exist absent taxation. If citizens aren't taxed, so the theory goes, then maybe they won't demand representation or results from government in the same way. And if governments don't have to collect tax, then maybe they won't do state building things like building up good ways of gathering information on everybody. If we look at European states, you can easily tell a story where states felt the acute need for more money (often for fighting wars) and this set off a chain of events that built strong states and created demands for state accountability to at least some segment of the population.Aid could also harm institutions in more mundane ways. For example, donors might want to hire local staff and might pay well by local standards. This seems like a clear positive, but if enough donors do this they might poach all of the best people from government bureaucracies. Donors might also want lots of reporting to make sure money is well spent. Again this seems g...