The Strategic Substitution of United States Foreign Aid

Abstract

I present a foreign policy decision-making theory that accounts for why US food aid is used strategically when other more powerful economic aid tools are at the disposal of policy makers. I focus my analysis on US food aid because this aid program provides an excellent case with which to test for the empirical existence of foreign policy substitution. Substitution is an important assumption of many foreign policy theories yet proves to be an allusive empirical phenomenon to observe. Central to this analysis is the identification of legal mechanisms such as the "needy people" provision in the US foreign aid legislation that legally restrict certain types of aid; this mechanism however, does allow for the allocation of certain types of foreign aid, such as food aid, to human rights abusing regimes. Thus, I test if food aid is used as a substitute for human rights abusing states while methodologically accounting for other aid options. The empirical results, estimated with a multinomial logit and Heckman model, demonstrate that countries with high levels of human rights abuse are (1) more likely to receive food aid and (2) receive greater amounts of food aid even when controlling for other economic aid, the conditioning effect of strategic interests and humanitarian need over the period 1990-2004.

Keywords: foreign aid, foreign policy, human rights